CLANCY IMISLUND (RIP) AA SPEAKER TALKS ON THE TOPIC OF "WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE"

I was told by Harvey (the old Central Office Manager) that Clancy Imislund won the deeds to the two lots for Ohio Street for $5 each. So there, that's something. The Plaque pictured hangs on the wall at the back of the room of Ohio Street. Restoring his faith in a higher power was the hardest step for Clancy Imislund. So when the day finally came in October 1958, to take that step, he put his faith in Bob. “I’ll try to do what Bob says,” he recounted decades later. That wasn’t Dr. Bob, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, but just Bob, a run-of-the-mill actor who became his sponsor in the latest of many episodes of sobriety. After several Imislund stayed sober that time, and for the next 62 years he carried the message around the world, giving talks almost weekly at AA meetings from South Dakota to Reykjavik, Iceland, and becoming a sponsor to thousands of others. Along the way, he left a lucrative career with a Beverly Hills marketing firm to become managing director of the Midnight Mission in downtown’s skid row, returning as a transformative leader to an institution that had once kicked him out for bad behavior. Under his hand, the soup kitchen and housing facilities grew with programs to address the social needs of skid row, said its president and CEO G. Michael Arnold. “He’s probably the first person to bring substance use treatment to people living on skid row,” Arnold said.eeks of tagging along with Bob to grab food at AA meetings, Imislund had an awakening. Evolving from executive to ambassador at-large, Imislund held the title of managing director for the next 46 years until his death Monday at 93. Imislund died of an undetermined cause while in isolation following a positive test for COVID-19, his daughter Mary Imislund Dougherty said. He was undergoing rehabilitation for a broken hip and was at the end of the isolation period when the rehabilitation center informed her of his death, she said. Growing up in a Norwegian Lutheran family in Eau Claire, Wis., Imislund discovered, as he would later confess, that, “I seem to need more fun than other Lutherans somehow.” The attack on Pearl Harbor offered an escape. He hitch-hiked to San Francisco intending to make something of himself as a war hero. Stints in the merchant marine, then the Navy introduced him to whiskey and tobacco to the betterment of his self-image if not his character. “I felt like men looked,” he said of his emotional reaction to alcohol. After the war Imislund returned to Wisconsin, enrolled in college, married Charlotte, “this girl with flashing black eyes and black hair,” and settled into what he would later recognize to be the normal life of an alcoholic. In Texas, Imislund had great jobs, Mary said, among them even directing the Grand Opera at the University of Texas. But he always lost them, falling victim to what he would describe as the recurring “spring in my gut” that made him restless, eventually turning the world from “technicolor to black and white.” A nearly successful suicide attempt led to a mental commitment and electric shock therapy. Imislund eventually headed for Los Angeles. After being ejected from the Midnight Mission, Imislund made the most important trip of his life, walking miles to the AA club at Wilshire and Fairfax where he fell under Bob’s sway. “He found me ways not to quit jobs,” Imislund would say. “A terrible process. I finally held a job for four months before I got fired.” Gradually, Bob broke through to Imislund’s faith which had been devastated by the belief that God took his son’s life to pay for his sins. “Kid, you’re not important enough for God to hate,” Bob told him. “By the time he died, I believed in AA as the higher power,” Imislund would say. It took five years to regain Charlotte’s trust. He got a job in advertising, became head of a family again and founded the Pacific Group, held in a Westside synagogue, that has grown into one of the world’s longest standing and largest AA meetings, said Watson, the Midnight Mission board member. It was in 1974 that Imislund returned to the Midnight Mission. Under his leadership its mission expanded to embrace treatment, work and housing services. He built its financial base with his pen, president and CEO Arnold said. In his talks, Imislund spoke of AA as a mystery with a practical goal. “Nobody knows why it works,” he said. “The purpose of AA is not to make you dry longer and longer. The purpose of AA is to do very slowly what alcohol did fast. To change my perception of reality.” THIS RECORDING MADE AND DISTRIBUTED AT THE MARINA CENTER, IN CULVER CITY, CA. RECORDED BY DAVE STEPHENS