Oceanside Tape Project: Recovery Speaker Tapes

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.

By June of 1999 Clancy Imislund had been sober forty-one years and had run the Midnight Mission on Skid Row for a quarter century. The Desert Pow Wow gave him the assignment that starts everything: Steps One, Two and Three.

They are the surrender steps — admit the thing has beaten you, concede that something bigger might not have, and hand it over — and Clancy had a first-hand claim on all three. He had arrived in Los Angeles in 1958 with nothing left to sell but a pint of his own blood, and the blood bank turned him down. The Mission fed him and pointed him at a meeting. He never had occasion to start drinking again.

This is the earliest Clancy tape in the Oceanside collection, and it sits at the front of a run that follows him across the next decade: Singleness of Purpose at the Southern California convention in 2000, the South Bay Roundup that same spring, the Host City meeting at the 2002 Pow Wow, Coincidences, Inches and Seconds in 2006. He died in 2020 at ninety-three with sixty-two years of sobriety behind him. On this tape he is teaching the three steps that bought all of it.

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.

Howard P. of Gilbert, Arizona, was booked into the Desert Pow Wow in June of 2006, and the desert kept asking him back — this archive holds him again the following June, leading a session on relationships in sobriety.

Outside the desert he is one of the better-documented teaching voices on the circuit. Eight of his talks sit in the public recovery-audio archives, and their titles read like a syllabus for the interior work: what Step Four showed him about being immobilized by fear, low self-esteem and the entanglement of the past, a program that works for atheists, and above all Step Eleven — meditations on the Twelve Steps, and an instruction he is remembered for, to mark the spot where you last saw your higher power pass and go sit in that window again. He carried the material well beyond Arizona: the Monterey Bay Area Roundup in 2003, a Day of History in Tempe in 2008, workshops going back to the early nineties.

That is the speaker this tape catches: not a man telling a drinking story, but one teaching a room how to sit still long enough for the eleventh step to do something.

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.

David and Karen S. of Newport Coast took the 2009 Desert Pow Wow stage together — a couples talk, David leading off, Karen closing. Her sobriety date is February 25, 1977: thirty-two years by the weekend this tape was made.

A marriage with three decades of sobriety inside it is its own kind of qualification, and the joint talk is the desert convention’s oldest specialty — two people telling one story from both ends, the drinking years and the recovery years held up side by side. That is what an Indian Wells ballroom heard in June of 2009, and what this recording keeps.

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.

Jack C. of Hagerstown, Maryland, spoke at the Desert Pow Wow on the sixteenth of June, 2007, and by then he was well into a national speaking run that would last another five years.

The public record holds him at the 30th Rhode Island State Convention in Newport in 2006, on a 2011 recording still sold by the speaker-tape services, and finally at the Erie Spring Conference in 2012 — the last lead he gave before he died. Three of the major tape houses carry him, which is its own quiet endorsement: the people who made their living knowing which talks people asked for twice kept him in the catalog.

He was a lawyer by trade, and the tapes that survive him are remembered for the storytelling. This one catches him in the middle of that stretch, a Maryland voice in an Indian Wells ballroom, five years from the end and still being asked to come out and tell it.

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.

Candice M. of Long Beach, California, spoke at the 2007 Desert Pow Wow in Indian Wells in June of that year, and the recording joins a trail that was already gathering speed.

Another recording caught her at home in Long Beach that October, and the invitations kept widening from there: the Georgia State Convention in Macon in 2009, a Steps Six and Seven workshop preserved from Atlanta, a Los Angeles talk in 2017, and a place on the speaker list kept by the Harbor Area Central Office — her own local AA office — in Long Beach. Her story eventually crossed into the podcast era through Sober Cast and the video archives, where it circulates under titles that spell out the arc plainly: from darkness to light.

That arc is the message she carried into the desert in 2007: a woman’s account of alcoholism told without cosmetics, and a recovery convincing enough that rooms from Southern California to Georgia kept asking her to tell it again.

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.

Father Leo Booth of Long Beach, California, came to the 20th Orange County AA Convention in the spring of 2005 carrying one of the stranger résumés in recovery: an English priest who nearly drank himself to death, then spent the rest of his life warning people that religion itself could be abused like a bottle.

Born in Manchester, England in 1946 and trained in theology at King’s College, London, he was an ordained priest with a working parish when the drinking caught up with him — a near-fatal car crash, driving drunk, that ended in treatment and a sobriety that held. Lecturing on recovery took him first around England and then, in 1981, to the United States; by 1984 he had settled in Long Beach, where he ran his organization Spiritual Concepts, served as spiritual advisor to treatment centers, and became a certified addictions counselor with a parish of his own.

His books made the argument his talks embodied: Spirituality and Recovery, Say Yes to Your Life, and most famously When God Becomes a Drug, which put a name to religious addiction and religious abuse and earned him invitations from Oprah and Good Morning America. On the AA circuit he was simply Father Leo — a fixture from the program’s 50th anniversary Founders Day in Akron in 1985 onward, an accent from Manchester delivering the least pious spirituality in the room.

That is the voice on this tape: a priest telling a Costa Mesa ballroom that God is not a slot machine, sobriety is not a theology exam, and the spiritual life begins where the performance of it ends.

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.

Coincidences, Inches & Seconds is a title only an old man can earn. When Clancy Imislund gave this talk at the AA Desert Pow Wow in June of 2006, he was seventy-eight years old and forty-eight years sober, and he had spent most of those years measuring how close a life comes to not happening at all.

His own margins were famously thin. A blood bank on Skid Row turned him away in 1958 for not having enough iron to sell a pint — and sent him up the street to the Midnight Mission, where a meal came with a meeting attached. That referral, worth nothing on paper, produced sixty-two years of sobriety, forty-six years running the Mission itself, the founding of the Pacific Group in Brentwood, and a sponsorship lineage that reached from Skid Row cots to Hollywood. Inches and seconds, all the way down.

By 2006 Clancy was the closest thing the desert convention had to a returning institution — this archive alone holds him at the Pow Wow in 2002 and again on this weekend, sharing the June program with speakers flown in from as far as Texas. He would keep at it nearly to the end, which came in 2020, at ninety-three.

The talk on this tape is the veteran’s version of the story: not how bad it was, but how narrow the escape — and what a man owes the coincidences that let him live long enough to be useful.

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.

The session title on this tape — Our Lives Will Be Transformed — comes from the promise Al-Anon makes to people who arrive certain that the problem sleeping in the next room is the only thing that needs fixing. Maria S. of Los Angeles drew that assignment at the 19th Orange County AA Convention in Costa Mesa in April of 2004.

It was not her last word on the subject. The convention brought her back in 2007, and the wider circuit kept calling after that — Colorado’s Crested Butte Mountain Conference in 2013, Nashville’s Music City Roundup in 2017 — until her recorded story outlived the cassette format entirely and settled into the podcast archives, where it still circulates.

Transformation is an easy word to say from a podium and a hard one to document. A speaking trail that runs thirteen years past this tape is documentation: the same woman, the same program, the same promise — kept long enough that strangers in three time zones asked to hear how.

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.

Maria S. of Los Angeles came back to the Orange County AA Convention’s Al-Anon track in April of 2007, three years after her first recorded appearance there — and a return invitation, in the convention world, is the sincerest review a speaker gets.

Her trail did not stop at the county line. In the years after this tape, Maria S. carried her story to the Crested Butte Mountain Conference in Colorado in 2013 and the Music City Roundup in Nashville in 2017, and her talks eventually reached the podcast era through Sober Cast, where an Al-Anon voice from Los Angeles still finds new listeners who have never held a cassette.

That is a fifteen-year arc from this Costa Mesa ballroom to the streaming archives, and it belongs to a particular kind of speaker: the one whose story about loving an alcoholic — and finding her own recovery inside that wreckage — keeps getting requested by rooms she has never been to. The 2007 tape catches her mid-arc, at home turf, doing the thing Al-Anon does best: telling the truth about the family disease without flinching and without blame.

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.

Danny B. of Austin, Texas, was working the western circuit in 2006, and the desert got him first — this recording from the AA Desert Pow Wow in Indian Wells that June, five months before a Las Vegas Thursday-night speaker meeting caught him again in November.

The Vegas tape survives in the public archives filed under the two words that follow his name most reliably: funny and inspiring. That pairing is its own credential in AA, where the best storytellers have always understood that a room laughing at an alcoholic’s logic is a room listening, and that nobody ever got sober from being lectured. Texas has produced a long line of speakers who work that way — drawl first, wreckage second, grace arriving somewhere in the last twenty minutes — and Danny B. traveled in that tradition, out of Austin and across state lines to wherever the podium was.

The Pow Wow booked national voices for its June weekend at the Esmeralda, and in 2006 one of them was this one: an Austin drunk with a good story, telling it well enough that the tape was worth keeping.