"I explain this at some length because I want you to be successful with yourself and the people with whom you work. We used to pussyfoot on this spiritual business a great deal more out here [in New York City] and the result was bad, for our record falls quite short of the performance of Akron and Cleveland, where there now about 350 Alcoholics, many of them sober 2 or 3 years, with less than 20% ever having had any relapse. Out there they have always emphasized the spiritual way of life as the core of our procedure… (From the personal correspondence of Bill Wilson, mid 1940. Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham in "The Spirituality Of Imperfection – Modern Wisdom from Classic Stories – Bantam Books 1992 p. 109f.)