The group began meeting at J. D. and Rhoda's 420 S. Denby St. every Tuesday night.  They later moved the meeting to Dr. W's and Dr. R's office, and then to a Presbyterian Church, where they met in one of the outbuildings (Dr. R was a member of the First Presbyterian Church). The group, which is today called the Tri-State Group, still meets in Evansville every Tuesday night. There is a letter from the New York A.A. office to "Joseph W." (Dr. Joe W) which is undated, but must have been written around the middle of May 1940. It says that a recent article in the Washington, D.C., Star was distributed by the United Press, one of the two major national press services, all across the country, and that this has produced two inquiries from Indiana. One is from Miss Katharine S., at the Beck Building on Spring Street in Jeffersonville, who wants someone to talk to her brother, who is a lawyer. She says that her brother "is working toward securing an appointment to the Supreme Court of Indiana. She says that he only has confidence in his own physician and I suggest that she get in touch with you and discuss the matter and then perhaps it would work out best if you spoke with his doctor first." The other was from C. P. B. in Huntington. He says "'I am interested in the problem of alcoholics as a victim and will be glad to hear from you as to what I can do to overcome same.'" The letter says that Dr. Joe's name and address has been sent to both parties. Joseph W. (Dr. Joe W) replied in a letter to Ruth Hock, the secretary at the New York A.A. office, on May 20, 1940. He told her that they had been holding meetings for about a month at that point, and we know that the first A.A. group in Evansville always met on Tuesday evenings, as it still does today, so the date of the first A.A. meeting in Indiana must have been April 23, 1940. |
| "I am very glad to get your letter and I am very glad to know you have referred the two people to our group. We would be very happy to handle any other that you might refer to us. We do have weekly meetings now being attended by 12 to 15 people. There are nine active members in our group and considering that we have only been going along about a month now in the organization work we feel that we are doing fairly well. "... I will report to you if either Mr. S. of Jeffersonville or Mr. B. of H[untington] reports to us. I am writing them a letter today extending to them an invitation to visit our group. "You will never know what great relief I have and what true happiness I get in working with other people who have had the same trouble." |
| A letter to Joseph E. W. from the New York A.A. office dated June 28, 1940, indicates that Dr. Joe had talked to Mr. S (presumably the lawyer in Jeffersonville, Indiana, mentioned in the earlier letter written around the middle of May). It links this with a reference to a visit Dr. Joe made to Louisville, Kentucky, which is right across the Ohio river from Jeffersonville. |
| "Glad to know you had an opportunity to talk with Mr. S, and was interested in the fact that you visited Louisville, KY. Do you make that trip very often? And if so, can you take any inquiries there? Please be frank about this for we have no desire to overburden you with A.A. inquiries to the detriment of your own affairs, and if you can't take them on we have complete faith that things will work out at the right time. "I took the liberty, however, of sending a Louisville inquiry to you today, advising him that if he could get to Evansville you would be glad to talk with him. He is H.H.H. He himself wrote asking for the names of members in Louisville and in the same mail we received a letter from his sister who advised that he had been contacted by A.A.s when he lived in Akron sometime ago but that he had refused to have anything to do with us at that time. He now seems very anxious which only goes to prove the old A.A. proverb -- 'If he isn't ready give old John Barleycorn time to get him ready.' "You might be interested in the fact that we now have 21 localities from coast to coast where A.A. meetings are held weekly, with another 20 localities where there are single individuals or a few who are attempting to get things started. You know how difficult it is to get any accurate figures on this thing but a rough guess brings us to close to 1,000 members. In our correspondence we use the round figure of over 600 men and women, to keep on the conservative side, and to keep to figures which we can more easily prove if challenged." |
| So the Evansville group was one of the first twenty-one A.A. groups established. If we look at a map of the United States, there were no other A.A. groups anywhere in the general area, so it became the center from which groups were formed, not only in most of the rest of Indiana, but also in southern Illinois and western Kentucky. The Evansville and Indianapolis groups also seem to have played an important role in the formation of the first A.A. group in Louisville, Kentucky. As we can see from the letter above, in June 1940, inquiries from Louisville to the New York A.A. office were being sent to Evansville as the closest established A.A. group. |
