Oceanside Tape Project: Recovery Speaker Tapes
Oceanside Tape Project
The Oceanside Tape Project is a recovery audio preservation project focused on digitizing old A.A. and AFG/Al-Anon speaker tapes and helping move them into XA-Speakers for long-term public access. These recordings come from conventions, conferences, roundups, workshops, group anniversaries, central office collections, tape libraries, and local rooms across the recovery world. Many were recorded decades ago on cassette and passed from hand to hand before podcasts, streaming, and digital archives existed. Our role is simple: find the tapes, digitize them, identify them as carefully as possible, and help keep the message available. This podcast shares selected recordings as...
Episodes
Chuck Lem. — Superior, MI — AFG
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.Chuck Lem. of Superior, Wisconsin, was an Al-Anon speaker with the kind of geographic reach that only comes from being asked back — a voice from the far northern edge of Wisconsin, across the harbor from Duluth, whose message traveled to ballrooms on both coasts and most of the country in between.His recorded trail runs through the Gulf Coast Roundup in Fort Walton Beach, Florida in 1996, the Mid-Winter Conference at Hilton Head, South Carolina in 2006, and the Marietta Roundup in Georgia that same spring — a decade of Southern conference rooms for a man from the shore of Lake Superior. The Orange County convention talk on this tape, given in Costa Mesa in April of 2003, sits squarely in the middle of that run.Al-Anon’s men have always been outnumbered at the podium, which makes a male voice with a ten-year circuit trail worth keeping. The program’s central discovery — that you can love an alcoholic without going down with them — lands differently coming from a man who learned it the long way and then spent a decade crossing the country to say so. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Sheila Armstrong — Oklahoma, OK — 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.Sheila Armstrong’s sobriety date is December 15, 1984, and everything before it reads like a study in how the disease moves through a family.Her parents divorced before she was old enough to register it. Her mother, an alcoholic who found it hard to care for her children, left in the middle of the night; Sheila did not see her again until she was eighteen. The family moved to California to be near her father, a longtime AA member who got sober, married a woman from the program with two children of her own, and assembled a blended household Sheila later summed up with a dry shrug: it was not the Brady Bunch. She and her father spent years estranged. She drank and used through several marriages — through pregnancy — until, fresh out of ideas and desperate, she walked into AA and, as she liked to put it, stayed until she caught alcoholism. It was her mother’s death from the disease that finally mended things between Sheila and her father, who died with long sobriety of his own in the late 1990s.By this Desert Pow Wow talk in June 2002 she was eighteen years sober, an active sponsor out of Norman, Oklahoma, with a recorded trail through Montana, Nebraska, and Iowa and a platform style audiences describe as humor shot through with tearful joy. She measured her own recovery in prayers — from Help me, to Give me, to the one she said she was still growing into: Use me. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Butch & Larcine G.; Marshall — AA / AFG
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.Butch and Larcine G. worked the Desert AA Pow Wow’s Family Meeting on June 22, 2002 — one program, two chairs: he from the AA side, she from Al-Anon, a marriage built across the divide the disease creates.Larcine, of Hawthorne, California, built a substantial reputation of her own: recorded at the North Shore Roundup at Vancouver’s Hyatt Regency in 2011, on the Beartooth Mountain Conference roster in Montana in 2014, and teaching relationships workshops that paired her Al-Anon voice with an AA counterpart — the same architecture as her marriage. Together, she and Butch kept appearing on speaker programs for years after this tape: anniversary meetings in 2010, joint bookings as late as 2020, two decades of being asked back as a set.A Family Meeting asks a couple to take the marriage apart honestly in front of strangers, and to do it as a team — the drinking years and the watching years told side by side without either account flinching. Butch and Larcine G. spent the better part of twenty years being asked to do exactly that, because they did it well. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Mari Gallagher — Wasaga Beach, Ontario, Canada — 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.Mari Gallagher got sober in 1984, and by the time she stood at the Desert AA Pow Wow podium her story had already been on the road for the better part of two decades.She is a Canadian voice on a mostly American circuit — Toronto, and later Markham, Ontario — and the rooms kept sending for her anyway: the Desert Pow Wow in Indian Wells in June 2006, the Crested Butte Mountain Conference in Colorado in 2011, the Beartooth Mountain Conference in Montana in 2016. Her Pow Wow talk was preserved and later anthologized on “AA Speakers: Women in Sobriety, Volume 2,” and the archives that keep her recordings file them under two tags that rarely sit together: funny, and old-timer.That is the woman on this tape: decades of continuous sobriety, a border and half a continent crossed to tell a ballroom of strangers the truth, and the rare gift of making them laugh the whole way through it. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Marty J. — Toronto, Canada — 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.Marty J. was a Canadian AA speaker with the timing of a radio man and the message of an alcoholic who had learned that cleverness is not the same as recovery.Sober since the mid-1970s, Marty’s tape trail moves through Canadian and American AA rooms under several catalog locations: Toronto, Red Deer, Richmond, Vancouver, Omaha, Kamloops, and the Orange County convention circuit. The cities shift. The voice remains the point.Public descriptions call him funny, and that matters. Not because AA needs entertainment, but because a funny speaker can get past defenses that would stop a solemn one at the door. Marty J. seems to have understood that rhythm: let the room laugh, then walk them toward the thing they were trying not to see.His later talks show a man concerned with the interior work of sobriety — reason, faith, surrender, and the bridge between a mind that wants proof and a life that requires trust. That is dangerous territory for alcoholics. We are often willing to understand ourselves to death, provided no one asks us to change.Marty J. carried a different proposition: recovery as movement. Not merely thinking better. Living differently.Toronto to Orange County.Canada to the circuit.A voice with comic timing, spiritual pressure, and the old AA insistence that the head alone will not save an alcoholic from himself. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Barney Morris — 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.Barney Morris — Barney M. on AA tapes — was a La Jolla, California AA speaker and a former television newsman whose life had the strange architecture AA loves: public success on the outside, private collapse underneath, then service work that finally made the man usable.Before AA, Barney Morris had been a broadcaster in the old hard-news world: Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Diego. He anchored, reported, moved between major stations, and spent years in front of cameras explaining the world to other people while his own life was coming apart in quieter rooms.His AA story did not begin with humility. The good ones seldom do. Barney came in with the résumé, the voice, the house over the San Fernando Valley, the professional polish, the opinions, the children, the wreckage, and the old fatal belief that intelligence ought to be enough. AA had other plans.The public Barney M. tapes show a man who learned recovery through action before he learned to like it: coffee commitments, floors, greeting, picking up newcomers, reading the Big Book, calling a sponsor, showing up when his head had better ideas. His message was blunt: getting sober is not the whole problem. The deeper problem is living sober without letting fear, ego, grievance, and self-pity rebuild the bottle in another form.That is why Barney’s talks still have voltage. He was funny, but not decorative. He could use a joke like a crowbar, pry the room open, and then walk straight into the real subject: surrender as daily practice, service as medicine, and AA as the pit stop where alcoholics get enough power to go back into the world without drinking.Barney Morris died in 2003 after a long public broadcasting career and a long AA speaking life. The tapes keep the better part of both: the voice trained for news, stripped down by recovery, and put to work carrying a message no camera could manufacture.La Jolla AA.Television polish burned down to usefulness.A man who finally found the story worth telling. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Jay P. — Myrtle Beach, SC — 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.Jay P. of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was flown across the country for the 2007 Desert Pow Wow — an Atlantic beach town speaker booked into a California desert resort in the middle of June.He had the record to justify the airfare. Seven of his talks sit in the public recovery-audio archives, and the trail includes the Capitol City Conference in 2004, a few years before this Indian Wells booking. That is the working definition of a circuit speaker: not a man who spoke once at his home group and got taped, but one whose story kept earning invitations from committees that had never met him.What survives on this cassette is the reason those invitations kept coming — a South Carolina voice carrying the same message into a room three time zones from home, on the theory that has held the fellowship together since 1935: it does not matter where the drunk is from, only that he is talking to another one. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Larcine G. — Hawthorne, CA — AFG
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.Larcine G. of Hawthorne, California, spoke at the Orange County AA Convention in April of 2010 — one stop on an Al-Anon speaking career that this archive happens to document across a full decade of its own.The Oceanside tapes catch her three times: at the 15th Orange County convention in February of 2000, on the Desert Pow Wow family meeting in June of 2002 alongside her husband Butch, and here in Costa Mesa in 2010. The wider record runs alongside it and keeps going — the Georgia Al-Anon convention in 2002, the Greeley Stampede in Colorado that same winter, the North Shore Roundup at Vancouver’s Hyatt Regency in 2011, the Cornhusker Roundup, the Flint River Roundup as recently as 2023. Her talks have since crossed into the podcast archives, where an Al-Anon voice from a small city in the South Bay still turns up in rotation.Two decades of invitations across four time zones, and the same subject every time: what it costs to love an alcoholic, and what is left of you when you stop trying to run the disease. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Sr. Maurice D. — New York, NY — 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.A Catholic nun from the Bronx walked onto the Desert Pow Wow stage in June of 2008, and the room got the last thing it expected from a habit: a comedian.Sister Maurice D. is one of the more unusual voices the circuit produced — a religious sister who is also a recovered alcoholic, and who tells the story with a bluntness and a comic timing that the recovery archives keep noting before they note anything else. The listings that carry her talks describe an amusing lady with a solid message, and the pairing is the point: she does not use the veil to soften the drinking years, and she does not use the drinking years to sell the veil.What she carries instead is the awkward, unfashionable proof that faith did not keep her out of the disease and the disease did not put her out of the faith. She had to get sober the same way the man in the back row did — one alcoholic at a time, in a folding chair — and then go back to work. Indian Wells, June 2008: a New York nun with a drinking story, making a desert ballroom laugh at the truth. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Clancy I. — Venice, 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.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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Howard P. — Gilbert, AZ — 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.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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
David & Karen S. — Newport Coast, 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.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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Jack C. — Hagerstown, MD — 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.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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Candice M. — Long Beach, 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.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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Fr. Leo B. — Long Beach, 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.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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Clancy I. — 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.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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Maria S. — AFG
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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Maria S. — Los Angeles, CA — AFG
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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Danny B. — Austin, TX — 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.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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Jim M. — Pasadena, 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.Jim M. of Pasadena spoke at the 17th Orange County convention in March of 2002, and the tape carries the kind of line that keeps a recording in circulation: seven years sober, he notes, and if there’s anything back there gaining on you — the statute of limitations.That is the register of the talk: a Pasadena alcoholic in the first decade of the work, funny about the wreckage without being casual about it, telling a Costa Mesa ballroom what the running was like and what stopping cost. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Babs Black — Dallas, TX — AFG
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.Babs Black of Dallas came into Al-Anon in the early 1970s, and by the time she spoke at the AA Desert Pow Wow in June 2001 she had spent close to three decades turning her family inheritance into working material.The inheritance was the disease itself. She had been around it — her phrase — this damn disease all her life, and described herself as coming from a long line of long-suffering women: a career woman who always considered herself among the great self-sacrificers of her generation, and who liked to warn audiences that her own mind is not her friend. The archive that keeps her Georgia recording notes what every room discovered live — a great sense of humor, and a favorite of many in the program.Her tape trail runs from a joint appearance with Al-Anon co-founder Anne B. at the Desert AA Roundup in 1983, through the West Virginia Al-Anon Conference in 1989 and the 44th Georgia State Convention on Jekyll Island in 1997, to this desert stage in 2001 — nearly twenty years of the same correction delivered with a Texas smile: stop suffering beautifully, and start living. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Diane B. — Mission Viejo, CA — AFG
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.Diane B. of Mission Viejo grew up in Chicago and its suburbs, and the family disease and its recovery eventually carried her the width of the country to Orange County’s Al-Anon rooms. On this tape from the 18th Orange County convention she shares the session with Jeremy O., a two-voice AFG hour.The family disease travels the same way its members do — from wherever the drinking was to wherever the recovery is — and this recording holds one Midwestern-born version of that journey, told to a Costa Mesa ballroom in the spring of 2003. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Craig Schreiner — Leawood, KS — 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.Craig Schreiner was born into AA’s own geography: he grew up in Akron, Ohio, the town where a New York stockbroker met a local surgeon in 1935 and the whole program began. He got sober a long way from it, settling in Leawood, Kansas, on the Kansas City side of the state line.That is the shape of this 2002 talk at the 17th Orange County convention: an Akron kid raised in the shadow of the program’s birthplace, carrying the message west to a Costa Mesa ballroom — the geography of AA folded into one life, delivered by a man who introduces himself on the tape with his full name and no apparent interest in hiding. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Vince V. — Venice, 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.Vince V.’s story starts in New Jersey and bottoms out on the Southern California coast — by his own telling, he once arrived in Newport Beach in a stolen hearse, with a young woman beside him he did not know. There is a bench on the Balboa Peninsula in the story, in early September, and a moment when the remaining options had narrowed to a mission on Skid Row.The voice on this tape belongs to Venice AA by the spring of 2002, telling the 17th Orange County convention how far it is from the hearse to the podium — an East Coast drunk remade inside the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is where, he says on the tape, he lives now. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Betty; Harvey; Oldtimers speakers — 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.The cassette label names Betty and Harvey, and both speak — but the 2002 Pow Wow Oldtimers Meeting was a roll call, and the roll was long. Admission to the microphone was twenty years of continuous sobriety or more, and the room cleared that bar with decades to spare.Kathleen’s sobriety date is September 4, 1958 — forty-four years by this weekend, sober since before most of the room was born. Bud Andrus counts from December 30, 1974; Monica from November 12, 1974; Eric Moll got sober in 1975. And the names keep coming off the tape: Albertine, Martin, Alex, Sarah, Fred, Larry Wilkes, Dave Pistol, Jerry, Len, Carol, Gay, Jane of Palm Desert — each with a few minutes, a date, and whatever wisdom survived the mileage.Add the numbers on this one tape and the combined sobriety runs well past three centuries. That is what an Oldtimers Meeting is for: proof, stacked one podium turn at a time, that the thing holds. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Kathy Heakin — Cincinnati, OH — AFG
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.Kathy Heakin of Cincinnati, Ohio, grew up in an Irish family where the drinking arrived a generation before she did and the coping came dressed as comedy.Her grandfather came over from the old country with a bottle riding in his back pocket; the family’s founding legend had him slipping on icy steps, feeling liquid spread through the seat of his pants, and sighing with relief — thank God, it’s just blood. When Kathy asked her mother years later whether he had been an alcoholic, the answer came back flat: of course not. We didn’t have enough money for him to be an alcoholic. He was just Irish. The family curriculum was humor, service to others, and above all silent suffering — suffering only counted if you never mentioned it. She grew up convinced that when alcohol finally turned up in her own life, the right words at the right moment would cure it. Al-Anon is where she learned no such words exist.She spent the next three decades lending that lesson to other people. From this June 2002 luncheon talk at the Desert Pow Wow, her recorded trail runs backward to a Twelve Steps presentation at the 1998 Cornhusker Roundup and forward through roundups and conventions into the mid-2020s — the Beartooth Mountain Conference in Montana in 2025, a Stateline recording in late 2024 — where she was still being introduced as one of the finest Steps teachers on the family side of the program. The message never wandered far from home: you can love your history, laugh at it even, and still refuse to keep living it. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Ken D. — La Mesa, 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.Ken D. came out of Brooklyn — a neighborhood where, as he told it, the Dons kept the peace and drug dealers got their hands slammed in car doors — and landed in La Mesa, California, with a story he spent more than two decades polishing into one of the funniest acts on the AA circuit.He billed himself as a man unscarred by education — someone who once thought Moby Dick was a venereal disease — and ran his talks on that self-mockery all the way down to the marrow of the program. The newcomer, in his telling, is a tragedy of motion: the hamster is dead, but the wheel is still turning. Sobriety was the business of jettisoning the make-believe persona to find the hole in the donut, the permanent empty space where he insisted God actually lives. He called the committee in the head a second disease, and his prescription was blunt: stop being a noun and become a verb.The recorded trail runs from Omaha’s Pockets of Enthusiasm in 1992 through this Desert Pow Wow talk in 2003, the Texas State AA Convention in 2011, Salem Soberfest in Oregon, and a Steps Eight and Nine talk at home in La Mesa in 2014 — more than twenty years of a self-described disciplined wild man teaching rooms to laugh at the disease of perception until it loosened its grip. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Lorna K. — New York, NY — 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.Lorna K. was Lorna Kelly of New York City: British-born, Sotheby’s-trained, spiritually restless, extravagantly alive, and sober from 1976 until her death in 2016.Before AA, she had already made history in a very different room. In 1976, she became the first woman to lead an auction at Sotheby’s main New York gallery, standing at the rostrum with a gavel, a theatrical British voice, and enough nerve to bend a very old room toward her. She sold beautiful things to powerful people and did it brilliantly.Then recovery began asking the more expensive questions.“In sobriety, Lorna’s life moved from Sotheby’s to service, from the auction house to Calcutta, from performance to usefulness. She worked with Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity, returned to India many times, and wrote about that spiritual collision in *The Camel Knows the Way* and *In the Footsteps of the Camel*. She had lived among luxury; then she went looking for God among the dying, the poor, the inconvenient, and the unadorned.Her AA speaking trail carries that same voltage: New York, Orange County, Maryland, Mississippi, Ohio, Kentucky. She spoke with the authority of someone who knew glamour, ego, alcoholism, humiliation, service, and surrender from the inside. Not as theories. As rooms she had actually survived.Lorna K. had the gift of making spiritual growth sound both grand and ridiculous, which is often how it arrives. One minute the soul is being enlarged; the next, one is still irritated, vain, frightened, and very much oneself. She understood that contradiction and made good use of it.New York AA got a voice with polish on the outside and fire underneath.Lorna Kelly knew the rostrum. She knew the gutter. She knew the rooms.And by the time she stood at an AA microphone, she knew which one had saved her life. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Steve Bordener — Van Nuys, 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.Steve Bordener, cataloged publicly as Steve B. from Van Nuys, California, was an AA speaker with a sharp comic edge and a message built on the unromantic work that begins after the drinking stops.Sober since May 25, 1979, Steve’s public trail places him in Southern California speaker rooms in 2001 and at the Singles in Sobriety convention in Oklahoma in 2002. The dates line up with your Orange County AA Convention tape from March 2001: Van Nuys AA, early-2000s circuit, a speaker already carrying more than twenty years of sobriety.His preserved descriptions give the shape of the voice: funny, self-deprecating, raw, and not especially interested in making alcoholism look glamorous. Steve’s material circles the real wreckage — ego, fear, resentment, failed relationships, emotional collapse, and the slow humiliation of discovering that putting down the drink is not the same as being rebuilt.That is where his humor does its work. Not as decoration. As entry. He could make the room laugh at the exact moment the truth slipped past the guard.Steve’s message is the old AA lesson with the varnish scraped off: let go, own your part, stop treating self-will as a management style, and take the Third Step as something more dangerous than a nice paragraph in the book.Van Nuys to Orange County.Twenty-plus years sober at the microphone.A funny man carrying a serious message, which is often the safest way to get the medicine into an alcoholic. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Mickey Bush — Canoga Park, 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.Mickey Bush — Mickey B. on the tapes — is an AA speaker with a British blade, a Los Angeles circuit footprint, and a message sharp enough to cut through a room full of comfortable slogans.Sober since January 15, 1983, Mickey became known for talks that are funny, fast, irreverent, and deadly serious underneath the performance. He is not a soft-focus recovery speaker. He is the sort who can make a room laugh, then use the laughter to get past the guards and put the truth exactly where it needs to go.His public tape trail moves through Southern California and beyond: Monterey in 1995, the 15th Orange County AA Convention in 2000, Copenhagen in 2009, Wichita in 2015, and later listings from Santa Monica and Los Angeles. The geography changes. The engine does not.Mickey’s great subject is foundation. Not the decorative language people hang around the First Step, but the deeper business of fully conceding alcoholism to the innermost self. He returns to the old AA question beneath all the chatter: do you know what is wrong with you, and do you know what to do about it?That is where his humor earns its keep. It is not there to charm the room. It is there to wake it up. Mickey can turn an acronym into a weapon, a joke into a diagnosis, and a Big Book line into a trapdoor under the ego.Canoga Park to Orange County.London edge, California mileage.Mickey Bush carries the message like a man who knows the disease is clever, the program is precise, and the alcoholic mind should never be allowed to grade its own homework. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Sue D. — AFG
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.Sue D. of Yorba Linda, California, was an Al-Anon speaker whose public trail runs through Texas, California, Georgia, Minnesota, Louisiana workshop archives, and AA/Al-Anon couples material with Keith D.Her known recordings place her at the 9th All Texas Al-Anon Conference in Houston in 1988, a Beaumont, Texas Al-Anon event that same year, the Marietta Roundup in 1995, the Horizon AFG Steps and Traditions recording in Dallas in 1998, and later workshops centered on the Twelve Traditions and practicing the Steps and Traditions in relationships.That gives Sue D. a clear Al-Anon shape: not merely a story speaker, but a Steps-and-Traditions voice. The difference matters. Story can open the door. The Steps and Traditions teach people how to live once they have stopped setting themselves on fire to keep the family warm.Her work with Keith D. also places her in the AA/Al-Anon couples current — that delicate borderland where recovery is not theoretical. It has to survive the kitchen, the marriage, the old reflexes, the heroic managing, the injured pride, and the strange temptation to turn recovery itself into another form of control.Sue D.’s Al-Anon message appears to have centered on practice: sponsorship, relationships, Steps, Traditions, and the discipline of letting recovery become behavior instead of decoration.Yorba Linda to Houston.Beaumont to Dallas.Story, Steps, Traditions, relationships.The family disease answered not with panic, but with a program. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Bob Olson — Littleton, CO — 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.Bob O. of Littleton, Colorado, was an AA speaker whose public tape trail runs from Founders Day in Akron in 1991 through the Desert Pow Wow in 1996, Frederick in 2002, the Gopher State Roundup in 2007, and a Primary Purpose weekend in Pennsylvania in 2009.That is a sturdy circuit record: Akron, Indian Wells, Frederick, Bloomington, Camp Hill. Different rooms, same assignment. Tell the story. Carry the Steps. Leave something useful behind.The later listings show Bob O. not only as a story speaker, but as someone trusted with Steps material, including a full Steps 1–12 weekend. That suggests a speaker with more than a single good drunkalogue in his pocket. The story may get the room listening, but the Steps are where AA asks whether anyone intends to live differently after the applause dies down.His Colorado listings shift between Littleton and Centennial, but the line remains clear enough: Bob O., Colorado AA, a voice preserved across nearly two decades of recovery-audio circulation.Littleton to Indian Wells.Founders Day to Gopher State.A practical AA speaker with mileage, structure, and the old-fashioned willingness to keep handing it on. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Pat Roach; Cliff R. — Oceanside, CA — AA / AFG
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.Pat R. and Cliff R. of Oceanside, California, were an Al-Anon and AA couple whose tapes traveled both separately and together through the recovery circuit.Cliff R. was the AA side of the house: sober in 1970, publicly recorded across decades, and known for story talks, Traditions talks, and the kind of sharp, funny, unsentimental AA voice that could make a room laugh before it realized it had just been corrected. Pat R. was the Al-Anon side: an Oceanside AFG speaker with her own recording trail going back at least to 1985, long before anyone needed to dress family recovery in therapeutic velvet.Together, they appear in the family-meeting current of the archive: Desert Pow Wow in 1996, later Marriage in Recovery material, and the larger circuit of couples who stood in front of rooms and told the truth from both sides of the disease.That matters because the AA/Al-Anon family meeting has a different charge. It is not only the alcoholic’s wreckage. It is the echo of it. The marriage. The kitchen. The fear. The jokes that are not jokes. The control dressed up as care. The apology that comes ten years late and still has work to do.Pat and Cliff R. gave the room both languages: the alcoholic learning to live sober, and the Al-Anon learning not to disappear into the alcoholic’s weather.Oceanside to Indian Wells.AA and Al-Anon at the same microphone.Two programs, one family disease, and the delicate, difficult business of getting well without making recovery another way to win. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Sandy Beach — 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.Sandy Beach — Sandy B. on the tapes — was Richard J. Beach of Tampa, Florida, one of the great spiritual voices of Alcoholics Anonymous: funny, exact, theatrical when it served the truth, and deadly serious about the work underneath the laughter.He got sober on December 7, 1964, a date with a certain grim poetry to it. Pearl Harbor Day. Wreckage, surrender, a life divided into before and after. Sandy knew what to do with that kind of symbolism. He could take the grand language of awakening and drag it back into the room where alcoholics actually live: ego, fear, resentment, perception, forgiveness, and the daily business of getting out of one’s own way.By the time he spoke at the 5th Annual Orange County Convention Closing Meeting in Anaheim in 1989, Sandy had become one of AA’s most recognizable circuit speakers. His gift was not merely that he was funny, though he was. It was that the humor never let the listener escape. He used laughter the way a good cardsharp uses misdirection: while the room was smiling, the truth was already in their pocket.Sandy’s great theme was spiritual perception. The alcoholic mind, he taught, does not simply drink too much. It sees wrong. It turns fear into strategy, ego into identity, and isolation into self-protection. Recovery, in Sandy’s hands, was not a moral polishing. It was a new way of seeing.He died in 2014 at an AA meeting while reading from Step One in the *Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions*. A clean exit, if such a thing can be said. Book open. Room present. Message still in motion.Sandy Beach gave AA one of its enduring voices: amused, awake, and unsentimental.A man who could make spirituality sound not like punishment, but like survival with better lighting. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Jim Holmes — Raleigh, NC — 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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
John Ackerlin — Laguna Beach, 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.John Ackerlind — cataloged on some tapes as John A., John Ackerlin, or John Ackerland — was a Laguna Beach AA speaker with a Swedish accent, a wicked sense of humor, and the old gift of making recovery sound not merely possible, but desirable. Born in Malmö, Sweden, in 1921, he emigrated to America after the war and eventually settled in Laguna Beach with his wife, Karin. Public records remember him as John G. Ackerlind, a man deeply loved in AA for the last forty-eight years of his life, especially for the way he made newcomers feel seen, wanted, and safe enough to stay. His 1983 Stockton talk gives us the voice: funny, direct, immigrant-proud, spiritually awake, and utterly unsentimental about alcoholism. He spoke of Sweden, family wreckage, daily drinking, the building business, the illusion of being different from “real” alcoholics, and the peculiar mercy of finally being simple enough to ask for help. There is a lovely danger in John’s message. He could make a room laugh, then turn the knife so gently the truth was already in before anyone noticed. His favorite kind of miracle was practical: meetings, surrender, Steps, Traditions, family repair, and the astonishing fact that an alcoholic could go back into ordinary life and live there cleanly. His tape trail runs through Laguna Beach, Stockton, New Orleans, Ocean City, and the Orange County convention circuit. But the real trail is simpler than that. A Swedish immigrant. A sober alcoholic. A man at the microphone telling newcomers they had a chance. And making them believe it. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Sarah R. — Fullerton, CA — AFG
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.Sarah R. was an Al-Anon speaker from Orange County, California, listed in your tape archive from Fullerton in 1999 and later in public speaker catalogs from Costa Mesa. Her known recording trail places her at the 14th O.C. Convention in 1999, the Orange County AA Convention AFG Luncheon in 2013, and the Kentucky Area Al-Anon Convention in Erlanger in 2017. That gives the record a clear shape: Southern California Al-Anon, convention speaker, luncheon speaker, and a message still traveling nearly two decades after the Fullerton tape. Al-Anon luncheon talks have their own kind of voltage. They do not always thunder. They often arrive with a smile, a plate of hotel chicken, and a sentence that quietly ruins the listener’s favorite excuse. The family disease is subtle. It teaches people to call fear “care,” call control “help,” and call exhaustion “loyalty.” Sarah R.’s preserved trail sits in that exact current of recovery: Orange County rooms, Al-Anon participation, the family side of the disease given its own microphone. Fullerton to Costa Mesa to Kentucky. A Southern California Al-Anon voice carrying the old message in plain clothes: stop managing the storm, find your own footing, and let recovery do its difficult, beautiful work. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Chuck C. — Laguna Beach, 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.Chuck C. — Chuck Chamberlain of Laguna Beach, California — was one of the great old voices of Alcoholics Anonymous: sober in January 1946, widely recorded, widely quoted, and dangerous in the best possible way. His message did not flatter the alcoholic. It did not pat the disease on the head and call it misunderstood. Chuck spoke about surrender, vision, awakening, and the necessity of a new way of living with the authority of a man who had stopped negotiating with the bottle and found, to his own apparent surprise, that God had better terms. He became best known through the talks later circulated as *A New Pair of Glasses*, recorded at the Pala Mesa Men’s Retreat in 1975. The title is not ornamental. Chuck’s great subject was perception — the alcoholic’s poisoned little lens, the terrible private logic that makes ruin look reasonable, and the spiritual change required to see anything clearly at all. His tape trail reaches back into AA’s early recording history: Beverly Hills in 1953, St. Louis in 1955, state conventions, roundups, retreats, International Convention appearances, and late talks still circulating from the early 1980s. He also testified publicly in 1969 as a recovered alcoholic and AA member, speaking for recovery without turning anonymity into theater. Chuck C. belongs in the archive because he helped shape the language of AA spirituality for generations of listeners. Not soft spirituality. Not parlor spirituality. The kind with consequences. A new pair of glasses, yes. But first, darling, the old eyes had to surrender. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Annie P. — Lancaster, CA — AA
Annie P., known on AA tapes as “Irish Annie,” was a Southern California AA speaker whose recordings place her in the old-timer current of the Fellowship: Huntington Beach, Orange, Westminster, San Bernardino, Burbank. Public listings say she got sober in the summer of 1968. By the late 1990s, she was still carrying the message through Southern California rooms, including the 11th YPAA Conference in San Bernardino in 1998 and a Burbank recording in March 1999 circulated as “Irish Annie’s Last Talk.” That title has weight. Not because we should turn it into biography we cannot prove, but because the tape world does not use a phrase like that casually. It suggests a voice people remembered, saved, copied, and passed along with care. Irish Annie’s public tape trail gives us the outline of the woman without pretending to own the whole portrait: an AA old-timer, sober since 1968, known enough to be cataloged by nickname, and vivid enough that one preserved story carries the title “Always Running Down Alleys.” That is not polished convention language. That is AA language — the kind that still smells faintly of cigarettes, coffee, fear, and rescue. She appears to have had the necessary old-timer mixture: edge, humor, survival, and the plain ability to make staying sound possible. Not pretty. Possible. Her 1998 YPAA tape matters especially because young people’s AA rooms need old voices that do not patronize them. They need someone who has been through the alleys, the bargains, the dodges, the escapes, and can say: keep showing up anyway. Irish Annie did. Summer 1968 to Burbank 1999. Thirty years of sobriety, one sharp Southern California voice, and a message that kept running long after the running was over. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Chuck Kelly — 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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Chuck C. — Laguna Beach, 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.Chuck C. — Chuck Chamberlain of Laguna Beach, California — was one of AA’s great spiritual voices: sober in January 1946, recorded across decades, and remembered most widely for the talks later published as *A New Pair of Glasses*. His central subject was vision. Not eyesight, of course. Alcoholics can see the bar, the exit, the lie, the loophole, and the bottom of the glass with supernatural precision. Chuck spoke about the other kind of seeing: the spiritual reorientation required to live without the old poisonous lens. He had the old-timer’s gift for making surrender sound less like defeat and more like finally putting down a weapon you have been sleeping with for years. His message was direct, searching, and unsentimental. He did not decorate recovery. He described the change that had to happen if an alcoholic wanted more than abstinence with a clenched jaw. The 1975 Pala Mesa talks gave AA one of its enduring pieces of speaker-tape history. *A New Pair of Glasses* is not famous because it is quaint. It is famous because Chuck understood that sobriety without a changed perception can become a dry little kingdom of resentment, ego, and fear. Chuck C. gave the rooms a language for spiritual awakening that still cuts cleanly. A new way of seeing. A new way of living. And, if one was lucky, a new way of getting out of one’s own damned way. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Cecil C. — Prince Albert, Canada — 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.Cecil C. of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, was an AA speaker with old-school mileage: sober in 1952, recorded at Blackstone in 1970, listed at Lakeside in 1992, and still speaking in Marietta in 2003 with fifty-one years of sobriety behind him. That is a long time to stay useful. Cecil’s public tape trail has the feel of AA before polish got anywhere near it: retreats, roundups, conference rooms, cassette tables, and stories passed hand to hand because somebody in the room heard something worth saving. Sober Cast describes him as a popular speaker of the 1970s and 1980s, and Gopher State preserved *The Cecil C. Story* as its own recording. The title is plain, almost blunt. Good. AA does not always need poetry. Sometimes it needs a man from Saskatchewan telling the truth until the room stops pretending. His story carries the authority of distance traveled — not just geographically, from Prince Albert into the American circuit, but spiritually, from whatever wreckage brought him to AA in 1952 into more than five decades of carrying the message. Cecil C. had the older rhythm: humor, memory, confession, and the hard little shine of gratitude earned the expensive way. Prince Albert to Superior. Blackstone to Marietta. A Canadian AA voice with half a century of recovery in the bones. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Pat Y. — Pasadena, 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.Pat Y. — publicly listed in recovery-audio catalogs as Pat Yeo — was an AA speaker from Pasadena, California, with a tape trail reaching from the Pacific Group in the late 1980s through Atlanta, Yosemite, Helena, Virginia Beach, Indian Wells, Vancouver, and Girlstock. Her known recordings show a long arc: Pasadena in 1988, the Atlanta Roundup in 1991, Yosemite in 1993, Pockets of Enthusiasm in the late 1990s, and later talks still circulating well into the 2010s. That is not a cameo. That is a message with a suitcase. Pat Y. spoke at the AA Desert Pow Wow in June 1999, part of a wider circuit record that places her among the women whose AA stories traveled far beyond their home groups. The public listings keep the details spare, but the pattern is clear enough: Pasadena AA, story speaker, Steps speaker, convention rooms, roundup rooms, and a voice people kept preserving. There is a particular authority in a woman who stays on the circuit that long. Not volume. Not performance. Endurance. The kind of authority that comes from telling the truth often enough that the truth begins to travel under its own power. Pat Y. carried the message across decades, from Pasadena to Indian Wells and beyond. No costume. No embroidery. Just AA mileage, a microphone, and the old impossible transaction: one life spared, then handed on. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Chuck C. — Laguna Beach, 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.Chuck C. — Chuck Chamberlain of Laguna Beach, California — was one of the great old voices of Alcoholics Anonymous: sober in January 1946, widely recorded, widely quoted, and dangerous in the best possible way.His message did not flatter the alcoholic. It did not pat the disease on the head and call it misunderstood. Chuck spoke about surrender, vision, awakening, and the necessity of a new way of living with the authority of a man who had stopped negotiating with the bottle and found, to his own apparent surprise, that God had better terms.He became best known through the talks later circulated as *A New Pair of Glasses*, recorded at the Pala Mesa Men’s Retreat in 1975. The title is not ornamental. Chuck’s great subject was perception — the alcoholic’s poisoned little lens, the terrible private logic that makes ruin look reasonable, and the spiritual change required to see anything clearly at all.His tape trail reaches back into AA’s early recording history: Beverly Hills in 1953, St. Louis in 1955, state conventions, roundups, retreats, International Convention appearances, and late talks still circulating from the early 1980s. He also testified publicly in 1969 as a recovered alcoholic and AA member, speaking for recovery without turning anonymity into theater.Chuck C. belongs in the archive because he helped shape the language of AA spirituality for generations of listeners. Not soft spirituality. Not parlor spirituality. The kind with consequences.A new pair of glasses, yes.But first, darling, the old eyes had to surrender. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Joe T. — AA
Joe T. spoke at the Opening Meeting of the Desert Pow Wow in Indian Wells, California, on June 20, 1997. An opening meeting has a dangerous little job. It has to tell the truth before the weekend gets comfortable. Before the banquet, before the applause, before the hallway reunions and the old-timers comparing mileage like retired smugglers, someone has to stand up and remind the room why everyone is there. Joe T. carried that first assignment. There is not enough public record to give him a hometown, a surname, or a decorated speaker-circuit biography. Good. The archive is not a costume shop. What we have is cleaner: a name, a date, a room, and the opening voice of the 1997 Desert Pow Wow. That matters because first voices set the temperature. They decide whether a convention begins as entertainment, ceremony, or something closer to rescue. In AA, the opening message is not pageantry. It is the door being unlocked in public. Joe T. belongs here as the man who helped open that weekend. Indian Wells. June 1997. The lights come up. The room quiets. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Brenda Lindgren — 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.Brenda Lindgren, also listed as Brenda L. from Minneapolis, Minnesota, was an AA speaker whose known tape trail runs from the Desert Pow Wow Closing Meeting in Indian Wells in 1997 to the Capital City Conference in Des Moines in 2007. A closing meeting is not a casual invitation. It asks a speaker to gather the weekend’s noise, gratitude, fatigue, laughter, and private little bargains with God, then send the room home with the message still breathing. That is delicate work. Alcoholics are famously capable of turning inspiration into a souvenir by Monday morning. Brenda’s place in the archive begins there: at the end of a Desert Pow Wow weekend, carrying the closing message. Later public listings place her still on the circuit a decade later, speaking as Brenda L. from Minneapolis. That gives the record a useful shape — not a passing appearance, but a message that kept traveling. There is not enough public biography here to gild the frame, and we will not. The tape does not need borrowed ornaments. It has the better thing: a woman in AA trusted with the final word of a convention. That matters. The last voice is the one people carry to the parking lot, the airport, the long drive home, the family waiting in the kitchen, the hotel room where the minibar looks very pleased with itself. Brenda Lindgren carried that voice. Indian Wells to Des Moines. A closing message with its coat already on, still doing the work. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Martha C. — Virginia Beach, VA — AFG
Martha C. of Virginia Beach, Virginia, was an Al-Anon speaker whose voice appears across the family-recovery circuit from the late 1980s into later conference and weekend recordings. She spoke at the 5th Annual Orange County Convention Al-Anon Luncheon in Anaheim in 1989, and public listings also place Martha Ann C. of Virginia Beach at Al-Anon luncheons, roundups, and serenity weekends from San Francisco to Georgia to Williamsburg. That is a long service trail for a program that does its best work without trumpets. Martha’s place in the archive belongs to the quieter courage of Al-Anon: the courage to stop managing, stop rehearsing disasters, stop confusing anxiety with devotion, and stop mistaking control for love in a sensible coat. There is a particular Al-Anon intelligence in speakers like Martha C. It does not shout. It notices. It learns the difference between helping and invading, between compassion and collapse, between a loving interchange and the old family habit of fixing everyone in the room before looking in the mirror. Her tape matters because Al-Anon luncheons often preserve the exact truth families need and seldom receive: the alcoholic is not the only one who gets to recover. Virginia Beach to Anaheim. A luncheon room. A family disease. A woman at the microphone saying, in essence, that serenity is not passivity. It is discipline. And some days, darling, it is rebellion. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
David H. — Lexington, VA — AA
David H. of Lexington, Virginia, spoke at the Central Office Speaker Meeting during the 42nd Annual Southern California Convention in October 1993. A Central Office meeting is not quite the same animal as a banquet, a pitch, or a Saturday-night speaker slot. It belongs to the working side of AA — the phones, the lists, the literature, the meeting information, the bewildered newcomer asking whether anyone can tell them where to go before the bottle finishes the sentence. That is sacred machinery, though AA would blush to hear it called that. David H. stands in the archive as the Lexington voice placed in that service room. There is not enough public record to dress him in biography, and that restraint is part of the work. What we have is clean: a name, a city, a convention, and a meeting centered on the practical heartbeat of Alcoholics Anonymous. Central Offices do not make recovery glamorous. They make it reachable. They are where desperation meets a phone number, where someone still answers, where the hand of AA becomes more than a phrase painted on a banner. David H. carried the message there. Lexington to Southern California. A service meeting, a microphone, and the quiet business of keeping the door findable. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe
Sandy Beach — AA
Sandy Beach — known across AA tapes as Sandy B. — was Richard J. “Sandy” Beach of Tampa, Florida, one of the great spiritual raconteurs of Alcoholics Anonymous. He got sober on December 7, 1964, Pearl Harbor Day, which is almost too perfect a date for an alcoholic surrender. A day of wreckage. A day of consequences. A day after which nothing was quite the same again. By the time Sandy spoke at the Desert AA Pow Wow Banquet in Indian Wells in 1992, he had become one of the Fellowship’s most beloved circuit voices: funny, lucid, theatrical when useful, and spiritually serious without becoming embalmed in piety. He had that rare AA gift — the ability to make a room laugh while quietly removing its weapons. Sandy Beach did not sell spirituality as decoration. He treated it as survival equipment. His talks returned again and again to perception, awakening, forgiveness, surrender, and the strange mercy of living in the present moment. Not as slogans, darling. Slogans are what alcoholics use when they are too tired to tell the truth. Sandy used humor to unlock the door, then walked the room straight into the work. His life ended in 2014 at an AA meeting, while reading from Step One in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. It is difficult to imagine a more fitting exit for a man who spent half a century carrying the message: seated among alcoholics, book open, still at the beginning. That is Sandy Beach’s place in the archive. A voice of wit. A voice of awakening. A man who made the spiritual life sound not like punishment, but like the only sane response to having survived yourself. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe