Alcoholics Anonymous History In Your Area
San Antonio Texas
http://www.aaofsa.org/archives/archivesindex.html
HISTORY OF AA IN SAN ANTONIO
Alcoholics Anonymous came to Texas in 1941 when a group started in Houston. Later that same year, a member of the Houston group, Mrs. Ester E., began a group in Dallas when she moved there.
The San Antonio’s history is blurry. It’s known that about April 1941, The Rt Rev Everett H Jones, the then rector of St Marks Episcopal Church, inserted an ad in the local newspapers announcing that he had information for anyone who had a drinking problem and wished to do something about it. Five problem drinkers began meeting in ’42 or ’43 at one of the Methodist churches. However after a few meetings everybody got drunk except a guy named Hollis N. That was the end of the fledgling group.
In 1944 the Rev. Everett H Jones, later to become a bishop, convened some of the more spectacular drinkers of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. He arranged for a member of the Houston AA group to san Antonio to show them how to reach sobriety and stay there. On the night the meeting was to take place, everyone showed but the man from Houston, who telephoned from a stop somewhere between Houston and San Antonio and said, in effect, “Better get someone else, I’m having a little booze trouble.”
Finally, Jones managed to get some meetings going in his St. Mark’s office, with help from an Episcopa1 bishop from Houston and an AA member who arrived from that town, erect and sober through 1944.
In April 1945, Alcoholics Anonymous moved out of St, Mark’s into a vacant, one-room grocery at 4th and Taylor Sts. The grocery was used as a meeting place in 1945-46. In June 1947 AA began to grow up when members rented a huge room on West Commerce Street, directly across from the Frost National Bank, in There was a taxi dancehall on the second floor and underneath, was a liquor store and juke joint. Members had to pass both of these in order to mount the stairs. That old W. Commerce citadel of “one-day-at-a-time” sobriety is gone now. Its members started the Sahara Club, Club 12, The Olmos Group at The Witte Museum, and the Collins Gardens Group. From there, AA spread like wildfire across town. Today it has an estimated 2.5 million active members world wide, and an estimated 3,000 members across the San Antonio metropolitan area
In 1949 the AA central Office was opened in the Travis Building, it operated on a daily basis with a full time Secretary. Today CSO operates today with a manager an admin assistant and the help of many volunteers.
The above information compiled directly from the Central Service Office Archives
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