The "104" Group
By Tom Shelley
When I got sober in 1981, I was making an effort to obey the "ninety meetings in ninety days" dictum that was drilled into us in the treatment center I attended. So, being a man of economical orientation, I decided that I would find the seven meetings closest to my home. In doing this I would minimize my travel and maximize my sober contacts. As though this had anything to do with anything, I would drive fifty miles to get a drink or a bottle when the bars and package stores closed in my county.
So, as random chance would have it, one of the closest meetings to my house, on Friday nights, was the AA "104" group. As it turns out the group took its name from a passage, on pages 104 and 105 of the book "AA Comes of Age". In this book, Bill Wilson, the founder and paterfamilias of AA, said something like: "...any two or more, gathered together for the purpose of discussing sobriety may call themselves an AA group...".
The founders of this "104" group included Charles (Pappy) and Lucybelle Guckian. Two of the most iconoclastic, interesting, infuriating, and caring people I have had the pleasure to meet. In short, they founded a truly secular AA group. The group operated without use of the twelve steps and without resort to the invocation of a higher power. Pappy and Lucy were ardent autodidacts (self-taught), which is a term I learned in my own self teaching. They encouraged everyone they came in contact with to learn, generally, everything that they could. Not just about the narrow focus of alcoholism, as though that weren't enough, but about every field of science, history, communication, etc. That last bit "etc." is homage to one of their favorite focuses, general semantics. A study of words, meanings, and the effects on humankind.
As you might expect, I found a home. I became a regular member of the "104" group. In the parlance of the group (and AA, in general) it became my "homegroup". I was steeped in the practice of making my meeting without fail, every Friday night. I was taught that sobriety was my priority (sound familiar?). This was Pappy's favorite focus. I learned a tremendous amount from Pappy, Lucy, and the dozen or so other regular members of the group. But, as often happens with many groups, the "population" of the group began to change. Pappy and Lucy left to start another meeting, closer to their home. Pappy has since died, last year at 85. The "104" group carried on for some time, though membership dwindled and we became kind of cliquish and clubby.
Relief from our doldrums came in the summer of 1987, in the person(s) of two men from Sarasota, a city about an hour south of my home in St. Petersburg. They came up to our meeting, one Friday night, because they had heard of our secular approach. They were interested and shared with us the article that Jim Christopher had written for "Free Inquiry".This word of a new "movement" happening in the home of "new movements", California, was intriguing. One of them had written to Jim for information on the nascent Secular Sobriety Groups (SSG). In turn, he passed the information on to us. I called Jim and we talked for some time. It was apparent, from the outset, that we were on the "same wavelength" and when Jim mentioned the "Sobriety Priority" I was certain that I was talking to a fellow secular sobrietist.
I need to say that starting a SSG group was not a simple decision here. For me, like for many others, I had the attitude that AA, in particular my kind of secular AA, had helped save my life. To "abandon" that and start a new sort of meeting was a bit scary. That may sound melodramatic, but it felt like we were flying solo here for quite a while. Curiously, it took many years, four or five, for the meeting to regularly get more than five or six people. Even with the relatively large number of secular AA members in our area. In recent years, we have increased our membership markedly with the change of meeting days for the main secular AA group. Our meeting now boasts a number of additional members from that group as well.
All in all it has been a great and wonderful experience. I want to thank everyone, here on the SOS E-Mail List, for helping to keep this alive and make it grow.
I apologize for the length of this piece. Please don't anyone ask me what time it is.