Recovery Life. It's life on life’s terms. And we see it every day… displayed through our staff and participants. They received the gift of Recovery Life and they’re determined to pay it forward. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. And Bob is no exception - he sets the bar for exemplary service and commitment to emotional sobriety. Listen on for his story and how he's living his Recovery Life through service to Healing Transitions now.
My name is Bob Goodale.
I'm in my 90th year, that is, I'm 89, but I'm milking the 90 for two years. I'm on the Board of Trustees. I've served on the Board of Directors. And I'm the chair of the development committee and I've been at it for 20 years here. Maybe more, I don't know, maybe 21.
It is incredible for me.
How long have you been in recovery? February 18th, 1972. By the time that you get this published, we may be able to say 51 years. Right now it's 611 months today. And I have kept track. I can't help myself. I have kept track of every month since the first month. I mean, this is unreal. It is. It’s just a bunch of miracles. I mean, a bunch. An avalanche of miracles.
We talk about doing 90 days. I've done 90 days 200 and some times. So I thought when I stopped, because I don't say “I got sober” - that's a common thing, but nobody gets sober right away..
What they do is they stop! And so I stopped February 18th, 1972, but I'm still getting sober. It’s about emotional sobriety, that's the deal.
I was 38. So the way it started, well started maybe at birth. But anyway, I graduated from high school when I was 17 back then, because I was December baby. That put me out of high school at the age of 17.
I was born and raised in Iowa. Five of my buddies and I went to Northern Iowa to Clear Lake and we pitched a couple of tents or whatever. They went and got some beer. And I drank a six pack. And the next morning I couldn't remember what I was doing when I went to bed. So I, you know, bingo blacked out.
That was the start of it, man. I couldn't wait. I couldn't wait to get that feeling. Not the feeling of the next morning, but the feeling of, you know, whatever that did for me. So it was gonna be 21 years of gradually getting worse.
I was better for a time. When I say better… you know, I went to Iowa State and excelled in any number of ways you'd want to measure it. I was drinking, and I graduated at 21 years old. So I’d been at it for four years.
I can remember hanging the beer in a laundry bag outside the window. That was to keep it cold. My capacity was prodigious.
Back in the day, this is a long time ago. In the fifties, pizza was a new, fairly new thing. And there's a bar. I must have been 20... They had a deal to drink a shot of beer a minute for 60 minutes. And it was a very hard thing to do. Most people puked or, you know, just couldn't do it. But I did that and then went into the night with a pint of Jim Beam in my pocket. It's crazy. Well, of course it's crazy stuff.
I laugh when I think of it because it’s just bizarre. Anyway, so I got married when I was 22. And then I was 30. We had adopted and we had, two years later, we had a baby and then we adopted another, and we were president of PTA and all that stuff.
I never got arrested. Should have been arrested thousands of times for driving while impaired. And blackouts were just normal. I was physically, spiritually, emotionally bankrupt.
I was active, really active in the Episcopal church. I was still doing pretty well professionally, although it was grinding down.
When I was 30, I went to the doctor and he said I had heart trouble and I was on Coumadin. I didn't have a heart problem. I had a drinking problem.
My wife Jane and I went up two weeks on the boundary waters canoe area, you know, making the circuit on the canoe. There's only a lot of bears up there. I noticed that on about the fourth day out because, you know, we were working hard, and all that. I realized I didn't have any booze with me. And I noticed that my urine was not the color it should have been, it was a little pink.
And the next day it was more pink. I didn't say anything to Jan. And, then it was not pink. It was red. So I figured that I stopped taking the Coumadin cause I was leaking blood. So we camped in a famous campsite on a peninsula where there was a cliff and then a peninsula and water all around us.
And you hung your packs up so the bears couldn't get them. But lo and behold, a bear got up in the tree and I've got, you know, I, and I know I've got this problem with my body going on. And the bear clawed at the pack and you could hear all the stuff come down. It was stressful, we're outside and all that.
Normally I'd go outside and I'd scare 'em away with pots and pants. But I was not about to do that cause we were on a peninsula and we were surrounded by water. I had no idea what the hell was going on. And so our food was in there and he got it all. I mean, you just can't imagine this. We were two or three days out [from our car and food].
But we made it back. There's always folks you run into or people will leave stuff. We made it back and she drove me right to the hospital.
The main thing is I was being treated for heart condition when I was 30 years old. I was just off the rails. My moral compass was spinning around. There was no true north.
But let's get back to the Episcopal deal. So I was going to go to seminary. And I was working the steps, so to speak, of getting that done. I was going to go to the Seabury Western Seminary in Illinois. And I can't remember what got in the way. Maybe God got in the way! Probably what should have happened, probably did happen.
But anyway, I was connected. So rather than go and talk to the Episcopal church, you know, the parish priest, I talked to the bishop. Of course my grandiosity brought me to the bishop. And so we were in Omaha and we went to one of Omaha's finest steakhouses for lunch.
I told him I want to go to lunch and that I had a couple things I wanted talk about. And those two things were that I was having trouble with my marriage and that I couldn't drink like other people. I didn't identify as I drank too much. And that's the honest thing! I mean, I just couldn't drink, it didn’t occur to me [that I was drinking too much. And all of this over three martinis a piece, which dates me.
We agreed we’d the work on the marriage first.
But things were going downhill. So a couple things happened. A good friend of mine who was older, he’d been in World War II, and he needed to have heart surgery.
We're talking about 1972. Heart surgery. He got a real bad cold and they had to put it off, and he died on the davenport. Well, I had always figured, you know, I mean, my old mantra was “well, so what?” Well, this was the real deal. And I remember I pounded the walls. I beat the walls. So that happened in January.
And then in February I was driving home and I ran the car off the road into a stubble field in February. And the field caught on fire. And I had flames come up around my car. I'm serious. I was surrounded by flames. And so the fire came up around me.
I got out of that and ran the car off again. The next morning I called the bishop and I said, I don't know what I said, I just got to get some help. And he said a treatment center just opened up in Omaha. And he said, "I'll call and you go on down there."
And so I did on February 18th, 1972. I was number seven. The bishop was number 46. There's a line right there. It was just luck, amazingly good fortune, why I never got arrested. Why I got out of everything. But I knew what I was getting into, it kept getting worse and worse progressively.
So I was in the hospital maybe the winter before and I was bleeding everywhere: bleeding esophageally, which is a bad sign. Blood in the stool. I remember one doc asked me if how much I drank and, you know, I lied, of course. But nobody ever intervened, so to speak.
Back then, I was in the dairy business. That was my profession - food - it just happened then to be dairy. Back then a lot of milk was home delivered. The company I worked for, they delivered the milk. So, you know, you're hiding, you're ensuring your supply. So I hid [alcohol] in the milk box.
This is after you went through treatment or before? No, no, no. Before. Once I stopped, I stopped. That was February 18th, 1972. So I went to treatment at this place. And they kept me. There was a 28 day program. That was common thing, still is. But they kept me 42 days, I think they thought, look, we're gonna see him again. That's the way it began. So the real important message is that I worked a two step program for a long time. Thinking that it was about not drinking. That was the deal. And it's not about that. It's about becoming emotionally sober. And you only do that by working a program of recovery.
You can white knuckle it or whatever you want to call it. You can choose to just stop, but the problem was me, not drinking.
It is about working a program of recovery. It's not about stopping drinking, that's another way to put it. It's not about stopping drinking, using, it's about recovering.
I'm wildly imperfect. I'm happy, joyous and free. But you're not going to say you're wildly imperfect when you're out there with your false self working up the ladder. You're not gonna go anywhere.
Happy, joyous and free. That's the promises of recovery. To become happy, joyous, and free. And I've added that wildly imperfect, that's the deal. And you know, and I'm free to say that I've been free to say it for a while.
But I would never have said it when I was your age. That's the deal. If we were all perfect, it would be boring. We wouldn't be so, we wouldn't be here.
But just the fact, you know, to understand that love is really the answer. You know, I say I love everyone I trust, but I don't trust everyone I love. That keeps me out of the business of being judgmental.
It just has to do with imperfections, you know? It's helped me so much in reducing being judgmental. This is a really important theme in this whole deal - that recovery is not just about not drinking or using. Recovery is becoming emotionally sober. And being able to say, I'm happy, joyous and free.
My name is Goodale. The only better one might be, you know, Johnny Walker. So people want to know, how do you spell that? So I say Good Ale, or bad beer. I think there's a pretty definite strong genetic predisposition here.
Back to the relationships. Family relationships are really important. Nobody's estranged. All families are weird. I’d call it healthy. Imperfectly. Healthily. Weird. And interesting as all get out. And family is - this is really important about emotional sobriety - I'm beginning to understand. I thought success was about money and power.
So what happened here is I got around enormous power and money. Enormous!
When I had it made and when I found out that it didn't fix me that day, let’s just say it was not a good day.
So that's, so when you talk about relationships, I was catching up, so to speak. I always say that I missed the decade in the sixties.
You know, it's just part of the deal. This is what we call fifth step - committing to God. Do to yourself to another human… but this was stuff that I've buried.
This place [Healing Transitions] is the power, you know, that's the real power. It's just unbelievable. Because the miracles are just pouring at you.