Online Aug 28
Clancy Imislund, longtime director of L.A.’s Midnight Mission, dies at 93
By DOUG SMITH SENIOR WRITER
AUG. 28, 20202:05 PM
LA TIMES
Restoring his faith in a higher power was the hardest step for Clancy Imislund.
So when the day finally came in October 1958, to take that step, he put his faith in Bob.
“I’ll try to do what Bob says,” he recounted decades later.
That wasn’t Dr. Bob, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, but just Bob, a run-of-the-mill actor who became his sponsor in the latest of many episodes of sobriety. After several weeks of tagging along with Bob to grab food at AA meetings, Imislund had an awakening.
“I began to get the sense that Bob knew how I felt,” he said, a sense he had never gotten before from father, friend or therapist.
“I never knew anybody who knew how I felt,” he said. “People like us are magnets for advice from everybody that we know. But if you can find someone you believe knows how you feel, that advice becomes meaningful information.”
Imislund stayed sober that time, and for the next 62 years he carried the message around the world, giving talks almost weekly at AA meetings from South Dakota to Reykjavik, Iceland, and becoming a sponsor to thousands of others.
Along the way, he left a lucrative career with a Beverly Hills marketing firm to become managing director of the Midnight Mission in downtown’s skid row, returning as a transformative leader to an institution that had once kicked him out for bad behavior. Under his hand, the soup kitchen and housing facilities grew with programs to address the social needs of skid row, said its president and CEO G. Michael Arnold.
“He’s probably the first person to bring substance use treatment to people living on skid row,” Arnold said.
Evolving from executive to ambassador at-large, Imislund held the title of managing director for the next 46 years until his death Monday at 93.
He left a legacy in the quasi-secret world of AA unmatched by any but founders Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob, said Stephen Watson, a Midnight Mission board member and one of the roughly 170 people Imislund was sponsoring up to his death.
Imislund died of an undetermined cause while in isolation following a positive test for COVID-19, his daughter Mary Imislund Dougherty said. He was undergoing rehabilitation for a broken hip and was at the end of the isolation period when the rehabilitation center informed her of his death, she said.
Growing up in a Norwegian Lutheran family in Eau Claire, Wis., Imislund discovered, as he would later confess, that, “I seem to need more fun than other Lutherans somehow.”
By the time he was 15, straight A’s and self-discipline were behind him.
“I have a flair for doing the wrong thing, to almost instantly do the worst thing I could have done,” he said.
The attack on Pearl Harbor offered an escape. He hitch-hiked to San Francisco intending to make something of himself as a war hero. Stints in the merchant marine, then the Navy introduced him to whiskey and tobacco to the betterment of his self-image if not his character.
“I felt like men looked,” he said of his emotional reaction to alcohol.
After the war Imislund returned to Wisconsin, enrolled in college, married Charlotte, “this girl with flashing black eyes and black hair,” and settled into what he would later recognize to be the normal life of an alcoholic.
Nights with family punctuated by nights in jail culminated in a vow of sobriety, made over the coffin of his first son, who died on a frigid winter night when Imislund was jailed and didn’t make it home to restart a finicky heater.
“John Imislund, this will never happen again.” It was a vow made to be broken.
The family moved a lot. The time in El Paso stands out as the pleasantest of her life, his daughter said.
Her father, a talented self-taught musician, partied at home with the city’s marijuana-smoking jazz musicians.
“My happiest memories are laying in my bed, smelling that smell, hearing that music,” she said. “They would sit all night and play the most amazing incredible music. He just gathers these incredible people.”
In Texas, Imislund had great jobs, Mary said, among them even directing the Grand Opera at the University of Texas. But he always lost them, falling victim to what he would describe as the recurring “spring in my gut” that made him restless, eventually turning the world from “technicolor to black and white.”
A nearly successful suicide attempt led to a mental commitment and electric shock therapy.
Thorazine and tequila followed. The night he went out to buy food for his new daughter Susan and didn’t come back, Charlotte packed up the kids and resettled in a one-bedroom apartment.
Imislund eventually headed for Los Angeles.
After being ejected from the Midnight Mission, Imislund made the most important trip of his life, walking miles to the AA club at Wilshire and Fairfax where he fell under Bob’s sway.
“He found me ways not to quit jobs,” Imislund would say. “A terrible process. I finally held a job for four months before I got fired.”
Gradually, Bob broke through to Imislund’s faith which had been devastated by the belief that God took his son’s life to pay for his sins.
“Kid, you’re not important enough for God to hate,” Bob told him. “By the time he died, I believed in AA as the higher power,” Imislund would say.
It took five years to regain Charlotte’s trust. He got a job in advertising, became head of a family again and founded the Pacific Group, held in a Westside synagogue, that has grown into one of the world’s longest standing and largest AA meetings, said Watson, the Midnight Mission board member.
Within AA, Pacific Group has its detractors who find it cultish and doctrinally severe.
“I don’t like the Pacific and avoid them,” said Sarah D. of Dallas in an email to The Times. But not Imislund.
“Clancy inspired the masses,” she wrote. “I see in my mind’s eye ... so many rooms, so many people crowded into the back, outside, in adjoining rooms. I remember his words. I hear the laughter. And i am grateful.”
He became what Watson would describe a 12-step “rock star,” becoming sponsor to Hollywood elites, judges and business executives along with the people he picked up off the street.
“If you asked Clancy how many people he had sponsored he would say, ‘One too few,’ ” Watson said. He estimates the number at 10,000 with the ripple effect touching tens of thousands of lives.
Family ties with his four daughters and surviving son were stable but distant, Susan Imislund Yodice, the daughter born in Texas, said. The daughters understood his absences as necessary amends for “things you can never undo.” After Charlotte died in 2012, their father became more spiritual and a more attentive father.
“He became this accessible, very loving dad,” she said. “I feel grateful that in my 50s I got this dad. And that’s been a joy.”
It was in 1974 that Imislund returned to the Midnight Mission. Under his leadership its mission expanded to embrace treatment, work and housing services. He built its financial base with his pen, president and CEO Arnold said.
“He would open the phone book and start writing letters to people in the phone directory,” Arnold said.
“He could create some of the most compelling stories about both recovery and the work of the Midnight Mission,” Arnold said. “It’s hard to separate Clancy from either the Midnight Mission or the AA. He dedicated the last 46 years of his life to trying to do good with those two messages.”
In his talks, Imislund spoke of AA as a mystery with a practical goal.
“Nobody knows why it works,” he said. “The purpose of AA is not to make you dry longer and longer. The purpose of AA is to do very slowly what alcohol did fast. To change my perception of reality.”
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https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/clancy-imislund-midnight-mission/
Brittany martin, LA MAGAZINE
Clancy Imislund, head of downtown L.A.’s Midnight Mission, has died at the age of 93. He was known for his work with residents of Skid Row, in particular, helping them access treatment for substance abuse, and was considered a leading figure in addiction recovery locally and across the country.
“We are heartbroken at the passing of our managing director and beloved friend Clancy Imislund. He has been the heart and soul of the Midnight Mission since joining the organization in 1974,” the organization wrote in a statement announcing his death. “For 46 years, he worked relentlessly helping disenfranchised people in Skid Row find a pathway to self-sufficiency.”
“Clancy Imislund was the Jonas Salk of recovery,” Ed Begley Jr, actor, activist, and friend of Imislund’s, shared. “With 12 steps (and often 12 good jokes), he could inoculate a large room, or one lonely and desperate soul with a cure that, unlike polio, didn’t last a lifetime, but one manageable a day at a time. The millions of people that he touched around the world will never be the same.”
Imislund came to his work helping others overcome addition after struggling with alcoholism. As a young man, he married, fathered four children, and became a successful advertising executive in Dallas. But that American Dream fell apart amid what a 1998 profile of Imislund in the Los Angeles Times called “a drunken haze.”
He borrowed a car, drove as far as Phoenix, and then got a bus ticket to Los Angeles. In 1958, he landed on Skid Row.
In a 2014 interview with KPCC’s Off-Ramp, Imislund described spending the night in an all-night movie theater downtown, and then being kicked out at dawn.
“They’d come in and say, ‘All right, you bums! Everybody out.” And that’s when I hit the street,'” Imislund recalled. “I ran into a guy who said, ‘Do you want to sell a pint of blood?’ And I said, ‘You bet!’ We walked up Fourth Street to a blood bank. And I did not have enough iron in my blood to sell a pint of blood, so they suggested I go to the Midnight Mission.”
He headed to the Mission for a meal, and the staff then directed him to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Imislund says he stopped drinking that day–and then dedicated himself to helping others.
The Midnight Mission was first opened in 1914, by Pentecostal minister Tom Liddecoat, who served meals to the hungry after nighttime church services (the organization dropped its official connection to any religious group in 1933). When Ismislund became managing director in 1974, he was only the fifth person to hold the job in the agency’s history. He became the first to integrate AA meetings with the Mission’s on-site services, and to bring a state employment office into the building, to help the Mission’s clients find work.
In his decades on Skid Row, he has noted watching the area and its needs evolve, particularly observing a surge in the homeless population and an increase in individuals seeking treatment for drug, rather than alcohol, concerns.
Outside of the Mission, Imislund was instrumental in an Alcoholics Anonymous organization known as the Pacific Group. Some have described the weekly meetings of the Brentwood-based group as one of the largest AA meetings anywhere, though that claim is disputed. The group was known for a hardline and religion-heavy interpretation of the 12-step recovery program laid out by AA founders Bill Wilson and Bill Smith in the mid-1930s.
“Adherents insist theirs is the only true path of recovery, and demean ‘AA lite’—groups that focus merely on drinking stories and complaints,” Benjamin Aldo wrote in a 2013 article for The Fix, a website focused on the addiction treatment industry. “Those who are uncomfortable with [Pacific Group] point to the insularity of the group, the rejection of AA members lacking enthusiasm for [Pacific Group] rules, and the notion of ‘better than’ sobriety.”
Those rules included a formal dress code, regular attendance at highly structured meetings, and an expectation of devotion which some have described as approaching “cult-like.” Imislund himself was an active and central figure within the group. After meetings or weekly softball games, members of the Pacific Group would often volunteer to clean up around his home or perform other acts of service, and enjoy meals at his home.
“Clancy is an AA ‘celebrity’ for dedicating so much of his life to the community of AA and helping men and women recover,” Mike Williams wrote for the website Addiction Programs. “From my personal experience, I was able to participate in the [Pacific Group] meetings and there were never any expectations foisted upon me. […] No AA group is for everyone, but there’s a lot of thriving people in this community.”
One individual who thrived as a member of Pacific Group was the father of writer Gregory Forrest, who described his dad’s 47 years with the program in a Medium post.
“Dad struggled in and out of AA for 12 years and could not stay sober. When he found Clancy, dad received the ‘gift’ of sobriety and he ‘got it.’ Clancy’s form of sponsorship was exactly what someone as sick as my dad needed,” he wrote, recalling the Pacific Group as a kind of family, complete with holiday events and get-togethers. “Clancy and the Pacific Group have saved literally thousands of people’s lives. I’d dare say many more than he has ‘hurt.'”
He is survived by five children, a large extended family, and thousands of people who cared for him.
“Clancy was the most influential person in my life,” Midnight Mission board member Steve Watson wrote in statement announcing the death of his colleague and friend. “He taught me that it is our great honor to be able to help another human being, no matter what their pain or suffering or needs are. He helped give me a purpose for my life, and that is to help my fellow man, woman, or child.”
Several individuals in Imislund’s circle have posted on social media that his death was a result of COVID-19, though no official statement regarding his cause of death has been released.
