LEONARD V. HARRISON

Leonard V. Harrison board trustee except 5 year hiatus 1956-1961 chairman

Fall 1950, Class A board trustees Leonard Harrison and Bernard B Smith resolved a 5-year conflict between Bill W and the Board on having a Conference.

Smith, who Bill would later call “the architect of the service structure” chaired a trustee’s committee that recommended that Conferences be held on an experimental basis from 1951-1954, and that in 1955 it would be evaluated and a final decision made. The
recommendation was approved at the Board’s Fall 1950 meeting.

April 19, 1951, 37 US and Canadian delegates (half the planned number) convened at the Commodore Hotel in NYC as the first Panel of the General Service Conference.
Bernard B Smith presided. 15 Trustees and various staff members from the NY Office
and Grapevine Office joined the Conference as voting members.

• The Conference unanimously recommended several advisory actions. Among them
that nonalcoholic Board members should continue in office and that alcoholic Board
members should have fixed terms of office and that AA literature should have
Conference-approval. The Conference suggested that the Alcoholic Foundation ought
to be renamed the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous. This suggestion
was brought up repeatedly over the next 3 years and was finally adopted in 1954