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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.
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