This is history of the Archives room at the A.A. Central Office in Salt Lake City Utah. Hi my name is Laura and I am an alcoholic. In January of 2017 I began a two year term as the archivist for Central Office. My duties included collecting and storing the minutes and agendas of the Central Office board and representatives meeting. Pretty easy duties. Pretty ho hum duties. During the January board meeting of 2018 it was announced that the building owner at 80 Louise, wanted to open up a room for us. At this point I was “given” the thought that an archives room would make a great and much more interesting duty than just filing stuff. So I made a motion and it passed, to create a room to store and display any archival materials from districts 2, 10 and 11. Some elementary history of how A.A. started to be included. The archives room became officially open in March of 2019.

It took a village to make it happen! First the walls needed paint (thanks Rob C.), then a slat wall had to be installed (thanks Rob C. and John J.), next in line was a table and chairs (thanks John B. of Tooele). One of the biggest tasks was finding a display case. Janet H., the repository archivist for area 69 had several, but finding time and bodies to transport one from St. George proved to be too much. In the end I happened across one in the KSL classifieds web page. The display case was just a couple blocks from central office, but I needed to find men with a truck and a big enough dolly for the job. This was accomplished by announcing the need in the Sunday Breakfast meeting at the Alano Club. I don’t remember your name! Thank you and I hope you’re still making meetings! Al, of Genesis Books donated a small display case, thank you! Another project that is still in the works is a timetable display of A.A. history including a map of significant sites and information. Thanks to Skip M. for the timeline. Thanks to Lisa C. for helping with the shelving for the grapevines, and my “normal” friends Shaun and Christopher for helping getting materials into the archives room. And last but not least I want to thank Bob C. for making sure the Grapevine archives are updated every month.

If you haven’t done so yet, come down and check it out! This room is your room.