Clancy Imislund died on August 24, 2020, at 93 and with 62 years of continuous sobriety.  “Clancy I.” as the AA World knew him (and perhaps only Bill W. and Dr. Bob,  AA’s cofounders were better known) became a successful advertising executive after only a few years of sobriety.   But Clancy gave it all up to become the director of the Midnight Mission on skid row in downtown Los Angeles.  He fixed his imprimatur on it by focusing on a recovery outreach to indigent alcoholics. Still, he was also an AA sponsor to the stars, including Star Wars Carrie Fisher, Dick Van Dyke, and close friend actor Anthony Hopkins.

He anguished for years over the death of his infant son, who froze to death in a house with no heat while Clancy was out drinking.  He struggled with a Higher Power whom he could not forgive or who seemingly would not forgive him either.

Clancy frequently spoke around the US and received invitations by AA groups in many foreign countries as well. It was his profoundly intellectual understanding of the program, the turn of phrase of a talented ad man, coupled with his exquisite sense of self-deprecating humor, which caused people like me to return again and again to hear his “pitch.”   His delivery was not aimed above his listeners but at a level that everyone could identify.   No one could explain better than Clancy what an alcoholic was and felt like, not only in sociological or psychological terms but in the everyday sense that others who shared the same disease could relate.   Clancy maintained that he had heard everything he ever could know about Alcoholism by the time he was 25.  But it was only “information” with no power to transform his life.

What was needed, and seemingly only could be provided by another alcoholic, was identification.  It was only identification that could suspend disbelief sufficiently to allow a suffering alcoholic to take suggested actions they KNEW wouldn’t work-and particularly those embedded in the infamous 12 STEPS of Alcoholics Anonymous.  But there was also more needed to sustain the fellowship of sober alcoholics. 

The Washingtonians, a temperance movement formed in 1840 by six alcoholics, focused on individual sobriety and it snowballed to a membership estimated at 600,000.  But in less than five years, it completely fell apart because they tried to increase their focus to address many other causes, thereby fragmenting the groups.   Amazingly, just a few decades later, in AA’s early days, Bill W. and Dr. Bob had never even heard of the Washingtonians so utterly had the signs of it vanished. 

Clancy consistently stressed how necessary it is for AA groups to live by principles as well. He worked hard to maintain “Singleness of Purpose” partly by not allowing speakers at the Pacific Group he founded to talk about addictions besides Alcoholism. Every speaker had to identify as an alcoholic or risked being asked to step down from the podium.

 Without “one drunk talking to another,” said Clancy, everything else is “just Information.”