Published: October 08, 2009 11:59 pm      

HAMILTON: Thirty years clean and sober

I was advised by some not to write this column, as it was thought that some of my critics may try to use it against me. But, if anyone really knows me, they will find that very little of my life has actually been about me. It has always been about others who, for whatever reason, have not been blessed with the material and spiritual things with which I have been blessed. Much of what I do is against my own personal good; but, I believe, it serves the greater good of the human experience. You may find a great deal of that in what you are about to read.

This month marks 30 years of being clean and sober. That’s right, 30 years of being clean, sober and nicotine-free.

As I have written in the past, I served offshore during the war in Vietnam and spent 13 overall successful years in the Navy. I reached the rank of E-6 after six years. For those who know what that is, then it goes without explanation. For those that don’t, it is considered pretty darn good. While I was totally dedicated to duty while I was on duty, when I was not, I was given over to the lifestyles of that period. I tried my best to be a sailor’s sailor. I smoked a pack and one-half of cigarettes daily, I often indulged in good cigars, I drank excessively, I used drugs rather heavily, and I tried to break records in promiscuity. I felt that I fitted-in.

But, all of it cost me. While I was very, very good at my job, it was too often that I could neither see, nor grab, the many opportunities that life presented to me, over and over again. What most people don’t know is that in late 1970 I quit high school. In early 1971, when I was 17, I join the Navy with every intention of becoming an admiral. Impossible, right?

Wrong. My 1973 tour of duty in Vietnam was cut short and I was ordered back to San Diego to participate in the Navy’s Broadened Opportunities for Officer Selected Trainees Program (BOOST). We were the third and fourth classes to participate. For many minorities, it was the first step on the way to a commission. Some of us took those steps towards those golden bars and eventually wore the dark shoulder boards of a commissioned officer. Some others, like me, left only footprints in the yellow sands of Ocean Beach and gray ashes on the steep sides of Sunset Cliffs. While many of my classmates were studying or in bed resting for the rigors of the next day’s academics, I was passing smoke on the beach between myself and people I didn’t even know. Too often, when my little camp fire had gone out, and I had drained the last drop of wine or whisky from a cheap bottle of booze, I was the last one on the beach to say goodnight to the rhythmic waves as they broke into moonlit, bubbly strings of lace and gently splashed against the shore. Too many of those passing goodnights became a goodbye to my past dreams, and intractably altered the course of my future. Soon I was packing up to go back to the dark waters of the sea being only a little better off than I was when I first left it.

As a leading petty officer, I was both very strict and very forgiving to the men that I caught using drugs at sea. While I would not write them up for it, I would confiscate it, chastise the men, then go out onto the wind-whipped forecastle and smoke what I taken. This, right in plain sight of the watch that was in the pilot house some 70 feet away. Onshore, we smoke and drank together.

There is no question about me being a highly functioning individual while using. In my civilian life, my co-worker and I would light up on the way to work, light up on our first break, at lunch, on the afternoon break, and then again light up on the way to the bar that night where we would shift totally to alcohol until the bar had closed. Too often I woke up in the wee hours of the morning wondering where I was. Sometimes I found my head in a toilet. Sometimes I discovered that I was home in my own bed. I first wondered how I got there, and then I wondered where I had left my car. Each time I would go to the window to look out into the parking lot, only to once again bump my head on the thick pane glass because I forgot to raise the window. Like my Philadelphia experimentation with snorting, it was by the grace of God that I survived.

Yes, by the grace of God. A young man, like so many of those that I met on the beaches of San Diego, someone I didn’t even know, introduced me to the power of Christ and over the next three months the transformation continued. While I made a conscientious decision to give up cigarettes, the Higher Power gently and unknowingly weaned me off the alcohol and drugs. I began to attend and serve in churches. The cost: My girlfriend dissolved our relationship.

That was 30 years ago. In that time I became a teacher in the Navy, wrote a script for a recruiting film, finished my Navy career, worked as a clerk for the city, started writing newspaper columns, took and passed the NYS Troopers exam with a perfect score and turned down the appointment to their academy, ran for county legislator and state Senate and later worked for a senator, was a ghost writer for an at-large Buffalo Common Councilmember, was a founding member of a growing church, was a chief advocate in the founding of a charter school, worked for an auto manufacturer, the power authority, two chemical factories and was a consultant for an international bridge company.

Additionally, I served as a local NAACP president and on nearly every civil rights board in the county. I was vice-chairman and personnel director for a community-based 501-C-3 and the chairman of the largest African-American festival that the city ever had. Furthermore, I was the first black person to head up the city’s library system and currently serve on the board of directors of the WNY Alzheimer’s Association. I share a microphone with the most successful radio talk-show host in WNY and am a talking head on cable shows. The list is not all-inclusive. I married, had two fine sons and divorced.

I say these things not to brag, because they really have fallen short of what I might have accomplished had I never used at all. I say these things because I still don’t feel that I have done enough in the name of my God for His creations who have shared so much with me. I tell you these things because every time that I drive past a hall where I know that there is an Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meeting taking place, I feel like I have left a little piece of my heart on the other side of the set of closed doors where I have never been. As I go by and watch the people who struggle with their addiction mill about, I think to myself, “There go I, but for the grace of God.” And I always wondered what gift did God give me with which I could help them? And so I write to encourage them to continue their slow, imperfect trek towards excellence as I continue mine. If there are those power-drunk people who want to use this against me, then feel free to do so — so long as you know that there are scores of people whom I welcome to walk across the imperfection of the bridge of my back on their journey to continued sobriety. Many of them have done much greater things than I have done. Those who have not done so must understand that they are not alone; and these things that I do, they, you can also do — and much more.

God bless.

Ken Hamilton is a Niagara Falls resident. Contact him at kenhamilton930@aol.com.