Clancy’s Tapes promote recovery

When I arrived, newly sober, in Little Rock in the fall of 1980, I was advised by my new sponsor to connect with the Cosmopolitan Club AA Group, go to Joe Mcquany’s Wednesday lunch meeting on Roosevelt Road and listen to “Clancy’s tapes.”

Clancy? Who’s Clancy? That would be Clancy Imislund, a one time ad game whiz, who remains, at age 90, among the funniest and most successful proponents of the 12-steps ever. Clean and sober since 1958, Clancy has just finished a multi-year stint heading L.A.’s Midnight Mission ministering to the homeless  and is back on the road again selling recovery at AA meetings.

Young and old, he attracts them all, and it’s the grandchildren who seem to be in vogue this season.

“Can’t find a good job?” Clancy  would growl at a newcomer. “Get a lousy job.”

“He should talk,” the affronted new comer might mutter under his breath, “he just told us he lived six months in the back seat of his car.”

Alot of Clancy’s rudeness to “newcomers” is calculated, at least in part, to scare them straight. And it works.

“The Midnight Mission” is no laughing matter. It is, a local reporter wrote, “a downtown gathering point for those who’ve given up on themselves. They cluster like cattle around its doorway, waiting for food in the daytime and hoping for beds at night. Food they get, but there aren’t enough beds for everyone, so they set up tents across the street or just lie on the sidewalk, too removed from humanity to connect with the world around them.”

While he was at the mission, Clancy said that almost every morning and evening he stepped over the bodies of men and women outside the mission. When he asked himself why he survived his alcoholism and they didn’t, he concluded that it was simply that “they were unwilling to take actions they didn’t want to take.”

It is not, he says, that God doesn’t love them. It’s that they fail to act.

Clancy also took himself to task

1. Lying to his wife, and looking contrite after a slip, he lies, “I’ve gone back to AA. They want me to taper off.” (That’s BS. They want you to quit!)
2. On his attempted escape from an insane asylum. “ I forgot. In west Texas they can see you running for three days.”

Clancy also touches on these unpleasant realities:

1. “The alcoholic thinks if there is a problem, he can drink it away.”
2. “Alcoholics have one thing in common. A belief that some day we’ll be able to drink.”
3. “Your problem is not alcohol, its alcoholism.” (Think about it)
4. “Alcohol changes our perception of reality.”

As for the solutions:

1. “AA will always accept you.”
2. “The goal for the alcoholic is emotional maturity.”
3. “AA changes my perception of reality, just like alcohol did.”
4. “AA is still one alcoholic talking to another alcoholic.”

I came across a clipping I stuck in my files about Clancy from awhile back, and this is what it said :

“They gathered in a back room of the Midnight Mission,” the local newspaper report began, “looking for all the world like successful businessmen. There were 10 of them seated around a table, some in coats and ties, others in open-collared shirts. Each told a story of self-destruction, survival and redemption, and their narratives were hymns of salvation.

“These are guys who climbed out of gutters of despair after years of addiction to drugs and alcohol. They were there that night to thank the man who helped them do it. His name is Clancy Imislund. To a man, they said they owed him their lives. Some said it with tears in their eyes.

“The 10 who gathered for dinner in the back room had been among them once, including Clancy, the canny old lion of skid row. He was a family man and an advertising executive before booze drove him into a hazy kind of hell. He came to the mission to save himself and ended up as its managing director for more than 25 years.”

There are an abundance of Clancy tapes available on UTube, and I replayed one or two over the weekend, and they reminded me of that old, gruff schtik.

If I were to name the men who had the most influence on my own recovery, I would include Robert Lewis, a founding pastor at Fellowship Bible Church, Wythe Walker, my late sponsor, Joe McQuany, the late founder of Wolfe Street and Serenity Park, and Clancy and his tapes.

I want to end with this postscript

When homelessness became increasingly visible in the early 1980s, most Americans were reluctant to admit what was obvious which was that the homeless people they encountered were seriously troubled and chronically disabled by alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental illness.

The numbers suggest that at least 65 to 85 percent of all homeless adults suffer from chronic alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness or some combination of the three, often complicated by serious medical problems.

Recovering addict, Michael Limatta, a one time Director of Education for the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions, spent over ten years as founding director of a licensed Christ-centered residential drug and alcohol treatment facility serving primarily indigent men.

He supports the numbers and refers to the book, A Nation in Denial by Alice Baum and Donald Burnes, as a useful resource.

“In their book,” Limatta says, “the authors shatter many of the myths surrounding the root causes of homelessness, which have little to do with the economy, governmental social policies, lack of affordable housing, and so forth.

“While millions of dollars may be spent on education, housing and employment of the homeless, these efforts do little to improve their lots if they are unable to stay sober by working through the very same recovery issues that many of us are dealing with in our own lives.”