Great Fun and Profit

Dears:

Grandma Letty gave a talk today and part of the presentation concerned the early days at America Online, more easily known as AOL, which were guided by a marketing guru of a CEO named Steve Case.

I had written Clues for the Clueless and received a message on my IBM from "Tribe." She said that if I participated in a new Forum (sort of a magazine on line; a quasi-website but located on AOL, that the forum would publicize my book as a quid pro quo. Envisioning Book-of-the-Month Club status, I signed up and went to work. The Forum was AARF, Addiction and Recovery Forum, and it took its format from the ground-breaking Gay and Lesbian Forum, the first place in the nation (that I knew of) where rights and networking were discussed among its adherents.

Begun as a commercial venture, it never yielded much revenue and after some 8 years or so was scrapped, but in the meantime it attracted to the Forum (later re-christened A&R for Addiction and Recovery) a phalanx of brilliant people from early computer nerds (we were doing this in the 90s and AOL had its own programming language) to psychiatrists to addicts of all stripes and shapes, including ground breakers like Kay Sheppard and Joy (? The food lady).

At the time, I lived in a 10-acre spot in the country outside of Orlando and hosted the group for a picnic/program in 94 or 95; I forget which. It was memorable for its collection of addicts. The sugar addicts and the food addicts fought, and one food addict was so heavy she broke my computer chair. Joy, the sharpest of all, had flown in from Los Angeles and the majority were from New York and Michigan and North Carolina, where the group was headquartered. We had never before met face to face; we were the first online company structure that I knew about.
It turned out that I had made a trip to Spain with one of the other addict's former husbands (when I was single) and other revelations followed.

There's a lot to be said for anonymity.

We did check it with AA's World Service in New York and they gave it their blessing as we held online AA meetings several times a day. Friends of Bill Wilson meetings were consequently going on AOL chat sessions, but we had rules and conducted ourselves as much like a face-to-face meeting as we could. We were a great boon for shut-ins and those just trying the waters, because the anonymity was total. Our screen names didn't even give us away. We sent many a seeker on to AA meetings in their localities after satisfying them they would be helped (read loved.) It was a heady time.

My book enjoyed a modest success and I was so impressed that all these people were giving their all for free that I bought AOL stock (at $40 a share; sold it three years later at $120 a share and took Dan (husband #2) to Machu Pichu. When I had a little money, my greatest pleasure was to go somewhere. Travel was my reward.......A&R indirectly got me there.