Speaking at age 80, Mary came to her first AA meeting 6/6/1939 when she was 30.
She was born, raised and educated in Atlanta.
She started drinking at 16 and still remembers the bootleggers telephone number.
She had a group of friends she drank with, a group she went to church with and hoped the two would never meet.
Her first husband was a drunk - she was 18 he was 30.
The whole family moved to New York in 1931 at the start of the Great Depression. They could not afford to drink.
Her husband got a job in Toledo. They moved there and had money to start drinking again.
At 29, in 1939, she'd had it with her husband, hocked her diamond wrist watch, wrote him a note wanting a divorce and hopped a train to New York.
Her brother in New York tried to get sober in AA after listening to Morgan Ryan's early radio message. Her one brother later died of alcoholism at 41. Another was 8 years sober in AA when he died.
Mary came into AA first.
Bill, Lois and Fitz M were at her first meeting. Fitz, "Our Southern Friend", became her sponsor.
Bill asked her, and Mary went to spend time with Marty M while Marty was still in Blythewood Sanitarium. So, Mary was helping women in AA in New York BEFORE Marty M was out of the institution.
Here the story of her husband, she and her daughter gets complicated but Mary stayed sober through it.
She suggests not to work the Steps but, rather, read and do them.
She was speaking at Kurt A's 3rd AA Birthday. He provided this cassette. His story from 2018, is also on WeJoy.
Kurt A of Jasper, GA at Holly Springs, GA 2018
Here is Marty M 19 days before her death in 1980
Marty M of New York at the AA International New Orleans 1980
(44 min) (7.7 MB) (id#2320)
