User:Mauihistorian

Richard Gordon Burns holds Doctor of Jurisprudence and Bachelor of Arts degrees from the Leland Stanford Junior University where he was Case Editor of the Stanford Law Review. He belongs to the Stanford Alumni Association. He also holds an A.A. degree in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley with Honorable Mention, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his Junior Year before being admitted to Stanford for law studies. He was also honored as president of the Interfraternity Scholastic Honor Society at U.C. There he was a member of the Delta Tau Delta Fraternity.

He practiced law in San Francisco for 10 years and then opened his own law office in Corte Madera, California where he practiced for 26 years before retiring in June of 1986. In Corte Madera, he was president of the Corte Madera Chamber of Commerce and the Corte Madera Center Merchants Council, as well as being Vice President of the Corte Madera Lions Club.

He resided in Mill Valley, California for many years. There he was president of the Mill Valley Community Church, the Redwoods Retirement Center, and the Almonte District Improvement Club. He was elected to the Almonte District Sanitary Board and served in that capacity for several years.

In addition to practicing law, he served as a consultant to the Wyoming Pacific Oil Company from 1955 and continues in that capacity. As a teenager, he was an Eagle Scout and Valedictorian of his class at Stockton High School, as well as Editor of its school paper, the Guard and Tackle. He played the clarinet in the Stockton High School Band throughout his high school years. In this same period, he was a reporter for the Stockton Record, a local newspaper. In 1943, he enlisted in the United States Army, attaining the rank of Sergeant, and receiving an Honorable Discharge in April, 1946. During his Army service, he attended the Washington and Lee University, graduated as an Information and Education Specialist, and delivered frequent addresses to soldiers on the cause and course of World War II.

He is listed in Marquis Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America, and Who's Who in Law, as well as Gale's Contemporary Authors.

He was formerly married to Eloise Beil Burns and then divorced many years later. The pair had two sons, Kenneth Charles Burns and Donald Gordon Burns

On April 21, 1986, he began a period of twenty-five years of continuous sobriety as an active recovered member of a Twelve-Step Fellowship. Four years later he began traveling, interviewing, researching, visiting libraries and archives, and studying books and historical articles and papers on the History of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Christian Recovery Movement. He has now published 42 titles and over 560 articles on those subjects and has spoken widely on these topics throughout the United States as well as on radio, TV, and internet media. He is widely recognized as the leading "unofficial" A.A. historian.

At age 86, he presently lives in Kihei, Maui, Hawaii, and continues his writing and speaking careers.

He writes and speaks under the pen name of "Dick B." in order to honor traditions of anonymity. He maintains several websites, for example www.dickb.com. He is Executive Director of the International Christian Recovery Coalition, whose website is listed in www.ChristianRecoveryCoalition.com.

Dick B. can be contacted at dickb@dickb.com; 808 874 4876; and PO Box 837, Kihei, HI 96753-0837.