Don Mitchell — Orange, CA — AA

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.

Don Mitchell of Orange got sober in 1978, and when he stood before his home county’s convention in April of 2004 he had twenty-six years to account for. He spent part of the hour accounting for other people’s instead — his talk reaches back through the voices that carried him, including a man he quotes who got sober in 1941, when the Big Book was two years old and the program had barely reached the map.

That is how the message actually moves: not archive to listener but hand to hand, 1941 to 1978 to a Costa Mesa ballroom in 2004 — and a local man with a quarter century sober passing along what was passed to him.