Biography of Fr Ralph Pfau author of Sobriety and beyond and the golden Books

Two posts by Glenn Chesnut on Ralph Pfau's Golden Books transferred from the AA History Buffs list.

The A.A. Central Office in Indianapolis (where Father Ralph made his headquarters at the Convent of the Good Shepherd) has in its archives one of the original souvenir booklets printed and distributed at the A.A. weekend spiritual retreat at St. Joseph College in Rensselaer IN on June 6-8, 1947. That's where the Golden Books got started.

An account of the way Dohr sponsored Father Ralph is available in Ralph's autobiography, Ralph Pfau and Al Hirschberg, "Prodigal Shepherd" (1958), which is still in print, and handled now by Hazelden. (It was published by SMT Press in Indianapolis during Ralph's lifetime, and for many years after his death, one of his nieces kept that operation going; she is eighty now though, and gave Hazelden the copyright two or three years ago. Frank Nyikos and I made a trip to Indianapolis and talked with her at great length just this past Friday.)

All the early printings of the Golden Books which I had seen up to that point said they were published by "The SMT Guild, Inc., P.O. Box 313, Indianapolis." The souvenir booklet in the Indianapolis A.A. office however says "Copyright 1947, The Sons of Matt Talbot, Indianapolis."

I talked for several hours with one of Father Ralph's last surviving close relatives while I was in Indy, and she said that this is what the SMT stood for in "The SMT Guild," that is, "Sons of Matt Talbot." The Golden Books were actually printed at Abbey Press at St. Meinrad's Archabbey in southern Indiana she said (that was where Ralph went to seminary), but orders were taken and mailed out in Indianapolis from the SMT Guild post office box address. Abbey Press didn't take orders or mail out copies, all they did was the actual printing.

The souvenir booklet has a picture of Matt Talbot (1856-1925) at the back, and a short account of his life. He was an Irishman with a bad drinking problem, who got sober in 1884 by turning his life over to God, and starting work with other alcoholics. There has been a movement since 1931 to have Matt Talbot officially canonized as a Roman Catholic saint.

What is interesting is that, although Ralph had begun to realize in 1947 that his message was designed to be heard by a much wider audience, and that he could not phrase it in narrowly Roman Catholic language (because for example the majority of people at the previous year's St. Joseph weekend retreat, the first one he held, were actually Protestant), he was still not fully ready to cut the umbilical cord connecting him with his Roman Catholic roots when he put that 1947 souvenir booklet together. He even has a Roman Catholic prayer for the canonization of Matt Talbot at the very end of the booklet! That was going to change pretty quickly though. He rapidly began to realize that he couldn't even keep it confined to Christian circles, because there were Jews and others in A.A. who did not identify themselves as Christians as all.

GOLDEN BOOKS WITHOUT GOLD COVERS

The three most-published A.A. authors who were themselves members of A.A. were Bill W. (of course), Richmond Walker (author of the 24 Hour book, etc.) and Ralph Pfau (Father John Doe, author of the Golden Books, etc.)

In my talk at the 6th National Archives Workshop in Louisville in Sept. 2002, someone said he had copies of what seemed to be the Golden Books in his archives which did NOT have gold-foil covered covers. I was puzzled, and didn't know how to answer that question, because all the copies I myself had ever seen had gold covers.

Well, by golly, I've now seen copies with different colored covers, and son of a gun, they really do exist! I'm sorry I flubbed on that one last September. Frank N. (the Northern Indiana A.A. Area 22 Archivist) and I drove down to Indianapolis, and spent last Friday afternoon going through the archives in the A.A. Central Office there. (Neil S. of Fishers IN, an Indianapolis suburb, is also working on this, and made these contacts for us - - bless you Neil!) Apparently, for a short period, Father Ralph experimented with using a different colored cover for each of the fourteen books, and sometimes even changed the name on the front cover, e.g. "The Blue Book of Happiness" and "The Silver Book" of something or other. There was one with a brown cover as well.

Frank and I also spent several hours talking to one of Father Ralph's last surviving close relatives, and learned all sorts of interesting things about his life. She took over printing and distributing his Golden Books after his death (and in fact was in charge of it until several years ago, when she turned the copyright over to Hazelden - - she's in her eighties now, and it just got to be too much for her to handle anymore). But she was not really involved with his books while he was still alive, so she didn't know when the different colored covers were used.

Frank and I are going to keep working on this one (there's one more of Father Ralph's close relatives still living, who was down with the flu last week and couldn't talk with us), and try to put some more exact dates on when the different colored covers were printed.

But for now, there don't seem to have been many printings done this way, but GOLDEN BOOKS DID NOT ALWAYS HAVE GOLD COVERS!

Another problem: REVISIONS IN THE GOLDEN BOOKS
The woman Frank and I talked to said that her daughter, a journalist, went through the books at one point because she felt they were so badly written, and made revisions before they were reprinted yet again. I think from what she said (and hope) that all she did was correct obvious typographical errors. But the later editions of the Golden Books will have re-set type with some changes at least. Working out a "pure" text of the Golden Books as Ralph Pfau actually originally printed them may represent some real challenges. At some point it would be useful to have some Golden Books where we have accurate information about the date on which each copy was actually published, so we can establish a textual history. For now though, I am going to continue working principally (in the biography of Father Ralph which I am writing) with the text as currently published by Hazelden.

Over the next several weeks, I hope to find time to write up some of the other things Frank and I learned from Ralph's relative. I'll send some of the more important things around to all the AA History Buffs, but I'll put a fuller account on my webpage at