Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (10 page)

Hubbard’s works are peppered with references to his
achievements. He often broke off when lecturing to relate an anecdote about his
wartime experience or his Hollywood career. Even before he generated a
following he would tell tall stories to anyone who cared to listen. He
stretched stories to the ridiculous, claiming he broke broncos at the age of
three-and-a-half, for example.
²
Most Scientologists believe these
tales. Few have bothered to compare the anecdotes or the many and varied
biographical sketches published by Hubbard’s Church, so the many discrepancies
pass largely unnoticed. The pattern of Hubbard’s reconstructed past is the
translation of the actual, sometimes mediocre, sometimes sordid reality, into a
stirring tale of heroic deeds.

Even critics of Scientology occasionally swallow part of the
myth. Paulette Cooper, in her
penetrating exposé
of Scientology, assured
her readers, quite erroneously, that Hubbard was “severely injured in the war
... and in fact was in a lifeboat for many days, badly injuring his body and his
eyes in the hot Pacific sun.”
³

But Hubbard’s accounts are not the only source of
information. By the summer of 1984, the fabric of his heroic career had been
badly torn, largely through the work of two men: Michael Shannon and Gerald
Armstrong.

In July 1975, on a muggy evening in Portland, Oregon,
Michael Shannon stood waiting for a bus.
⁴
A young man approached
him, and asked if he wanted to attend a free lecture. Shannon went along, thinking
that at least the lecture room would be air-conditioned (it was not). He
listened to a short, plausible talk about “Affinity, Reality and Communication,”
and after a brief sales pitch signed up for the “Communication Course.”

Many Scientologists’ stories begin this way. Shannon’s soon
took a different turn. The next day he decided he did not want to do the
Communication Course and, after a “brief but rather heated discussion,” managed
to get his money back. He kept and read the copy of
Dianetics: The Modern
Science of Mental Health
which kindled his curiosity, not for Dianetics,
but for its originator:

“I started buying books. Lots of books. There was a second
hand bookstore a few blocks away and they were cheaper, and I discovered they
had books by other writers that were about Scientology - I happened on the hard
to find
The Scandal of Scientology
by Paulette Cooper. Now I was
fascinated, and started collecting everything I could get my eager hands on -
magazine articles, newspaper clippings, government files, anything.”

By 1979, Shannon had spent $4,000 on his project and had
collected “a mountain of material which included some files that no one else
had bothered to get copies of - for example, the log books of the Navy ships
that Hubbard had served on, and his father’s Navy service file.” Shannon
intended to write an exposé of Hubbard.

After failing to find a publisher, Shannon sent the most
significant material to a few concerned individuals and ducked out of sight, fearful
of reprisals. Five years later, he was still in hiding and my efforts to
contact him failed. The hundred pages Shannon sent out included copies of some
of Hubbard’s naval and college records, as well as responses to Shannon’s many
letters inquiring into Hubbard’s expeditions and other alleged exploits.

The “Shannon documents” found their way to Gerald Armstrong.
Armstrong had been a dedicated Sea Org member for nearly ten years when he
began a “biography project” authorized by Hubbard. Much of the immense archive
collected by Armstrong consisted of Hubbard’s own papers, not the forgeries
that Hubbard claimed had been created by government agencies to discredit
Scientology. The archive largely confirmed Shannon’s material. Armstrong and
Shannon reached the same eventual destination from opposed starting points.

To complete the picture has taken a great deal more
research, but the foundations were well laid by Armstrong and Shannon. Let us
compare Scientology’s changing versions of the life of L. Ron Hubbard with the
truth:

There is
some
agreement between all concerned on at
least one fact: Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, on March
13, 1911, despite one of his later claims, it was not
Friday
the 13
^th
.
⁵

His Birth Certificate also shows that Ron was born in Dr.
Campbell’s Hospital on Oak Street with S.A. Campbell “in attendance.”

His mother, Ledora May Hubbard, had returned to the town of
her birth to bring her son into the world. His father was Harry Ross Hubbard.
Although Ron boasted about his paternal ancestry, the famous Hubbard name, in
fact, Harry Hubbard had been an orphan and was born Henry August Wilson.
⁶
L. Ron had not a drop of Hubbard blood in him.

Ron claimed that he was born the son of a US Navy Commander.
⁷
Harry Hubbard had served a four year stint in the Navy as an enlisted man until
1908. He re-enlisted when America entered World War I, when his son was six.
Harry Hubbard eventually did become a Lieutenant Commander, but not until 1934.
⁸

From this point, the Scientology accounts of Hubbard’s life
are usually at variance with the facts and often at variance with one another.
We are told that when Ron was six months
⁹
(or three weeks, in
another Hubbard account
¹⁰
) his family moved to Oklahoma. In fact,
the first account is nearly accurate: the Hubbard family spent the Christmas season
in Oklahoma, with Ron’s maternal grandparents, then moved on to Kalispell,
Montana.
¹¹

Before he was a year old, one Scientology version continues,
Hubbard was sent to his maternal grandparents, the Waterburys, because his
“father’s career kept the family on the move.”
¹²
His grandparents
owned an enormous cattle ranch, “one quarter of Montana.”
¹³
Shannon
found no record of the Waterbury ranch, because it was not in Helena. But Ron’s
grandfather did briefly own 320 acres (a half-section) west of Kalispell, where
he pastured horses.
¹⁴
Montana amounts to 94 million acres.

Ron supposedly learned to ride before he could walk and was
breaking “broncos” at the age of three-and-a-half, at which age he could also
read and write.
¹⁵
He became a blood brother of the Blackfoot Indians
in 1915 (aged four at most) and remained with his grandparents, the Waterburys,
until he was ten.
¹⁶

Hubbard described his early years thus: “Until I was ten, I
lived the hard life of the West, in a land of 40-degree-below blizzards and
vast spaces.”
¹⁷

The City Directories published in many US towns listed the
inhabitants, their jobs, addresses, and the value of their taxable assets. In
the 1913 Kalispell Directory, Lafayette Waterbury was assessed at $1,550. He
was comfortable, but by no means rich.

In truth, when Ron’s grandfather moved to Kalispell and
bought his half-section, he continued to earn his living as a veterinarian. By
1917 he was living in Helena, running the Capital City Coal Company.
¹⁸
Ron’s father, Harry, had left his job on a Kalispell newspaper,
¹⁹
to
become manager of the Family Theater in Helena, Montana, in 1913. Between 1913
and 1916 he worked as a book-keeper at the Ives Smith Coal and Cattle Company.
The next year, when Ron was six, Harry was working at the same place as a
wagon-driver. Harry Hubbard helped his father-in-law set up the Capitol City
Coal Company
¹⁸
before re-enlisting in the US Navy on October 10,
1917, where he remained until his retirement in 1946.
²⁰
Ron’s mother
did clerical work for government agencies.
¹⁸

There is actually no way of checking whether Ron, or anyone
else, became a “blood brother” of the Blackfeet in 1915. There are no records.
It seems unlikely, as the Piegan reservation was over 60 miles from the
Waterbury half-section, and over 100 from Helena,
²¹
where Ron was
living with his parents in 1915. Nonetheless, the Blackfeet, having initially
admitted that there are no records, have decided to take Ron’s word for it,
which is embarrassing as in the 1930s Hubbard admitted that what he knew of the
Blackfeet came second-hand from someone who really had been a bloodbrother.
²²

Hubbard was certainly an enthralling story-teller. He once
told an audience that when he was six, his neighborhood was terrorized by a
12-year-old bully called Leon Brown, and by “the five O’Connell kids,” aged
from 7 to 15. Ron learned “lumberjack fighting” from his grandfather, and took
on the two youngest O’Connell kids one after the other. The O’Connell kids
“fled each time I showed up ... Then one day I got up on a nine-foot high board
fence and waited until the 12 year old bully passed by and leaped off on him
boots and all and after the dust settled that neighborhood was safe for every
kid in it.”
²³

Shannon located school registration cards for five Helena
boys called O’Connell. When Ron was six, the oldest O’Connell boy was 16, and
the youngest five. Shannon did not find Leon Brown, but he did exist, living a
few doors away from Ron, and he was 12 in 1917.
²⁴
Ron Hubbard must
have been a very tough six-year-old!

Ron’s grandfather’s coal company in Helena had failed by
1925, and the Helena City Directory listed him as the owner of an automobile
spare parts business. By 1929, Waterbury had returned to veterinary work. He
died two years later, still at 736 Fifth Avenue, Helena.
²⁵
His
obituary made no mention of his having been a rancher.
²⁶

Ron Hubbard claimed he had been raised by his maternal
grandparents. In fact, he was with both of his parents until his father rejoined
the Navy, in 1917. Even then his mother stayed put with her family until 1923
²⁷
,
when she joined her husband, taking Ron with her. Ron was part of a tolerant
and joyful family community.

The young Hubbard probably spent a few weeks on his
grandfather’s small stud farm. To a three year old boy those 320 acres near
Kalispell probably seemed like a quarter of Montana. He undoubtedly met
cowboys, and perhaps even Blackfoot Indians (possibly on the rail journey from
Helena to Kalispell). There is nothing wrong with any of this, except, from
Hubbard’s point of view, the scale. It was all far too small. To be revered as
the most amazing man who had ever drawn breath, Hubbard would have to do far
better.

Hubbard claimed that his interest in the human mind was sparked
by a meeting with one Commander Thompson when Hubbard was 12. According to
Hubbard, they met during a trip through the Panama Canal en route to
Washington, DC.
²⁸
Thompson was a Navy doctor, with an abiding
interest in psychoanalysis, supposedly “a personal student of Sigmund Freud.”
From Thompson, Hubbard “received an extensive education in the field of the
human mind.” In a 1953 publication Hubbard claimed that his “research” began
when he met Thompson.
²⁹
The claim has the romantic ring of Hubbard’s
pulp fiction.

Commander “Snake” or “Crazy” Thompson (as Hubbard called
him) is something of an enigma. Neither Shannon nor Armstrong discovered
anything about him. During the Armstrong case in 1984, Scientology Archivist
Vaughn Young at least proved “Snake” Thompson’s existence. Young had spoken to
Thompson’s daughter, who attested her father’s love of snakes. A library
catalogue listing several papers by Thompson on the subjects both of snakes and
the human mind, and a postcard from Freud to Thompson were produced. His death
certificate showed that he had indeed been a Commander in the US Navy.

For Scientology Archivist Young, an educated man who had abandoned
a master’s degree in philosophy for Scientology, Thompson’s existence, evidence
of his nickname, and a postcard,
³⁰
were sufficient proof of
Hubbard’s claims to have been tutored in the Freudian mysteries by this Navy
doctor, at the age of 12. Hubbard’s extensive teenage diaries make no mention
of either Thompson or Freud. Nor do they contain any material which supports
the idea that the juvenile Hubbard was “researching” the human mind.

Scientologists claim Ron became the youngest Eagle Scout in
America at the age of 12, in Washington, DC, and that he was a “close friend of
President Coolidge’s son, Calvin Jr., whose early death accelerated L. Ron
Hubbard’s precocious interest in the mind and spirit of Man.”
³¹

In a diary, written when he was about 19, Hubbard recalled
his acquisition of the Boy Scout Eagle.
³²

A photograph taken at the time shows Hubbard in uniform, all
freckles and acne, with the 21 necessary merit badges stitched on to a sash.
There is no way of knowing whether he was the
youngest
Eagle Scout in
America. The Boy Scouts place no value on the age at which a boy becomes an
Eagle Scout, and have never kept a record, nor was there any way that Hubbard
could find out. But the Boy Scouts do have a record of a Ronald Hubbard who
became an Eagle Scout in Washington DC, and was a member of Troop 10. The Eagle
was actually awarded on March 28, 1924, some two weeks after L Ron Hubbard’s
13th birthday.

In the same diary, Hubbard recollected a meeting with
President Coolidge. He was one of some forty boys. The meeting consisted of
Hubbard telling his name to the President and a handshake.

Rank Pathé took newsreel film of the boys. Out of this
meeting blossomed the supposed close relationship with Coolidge’s son, Cal Jr.,
whose early death was to spur Hubbard’s “research.” The relationship existed
only in Hubbard’s mind, which is confirmed by comparing Cal Jr’s movements to
Hubbard’s. Moreover, there is no mention of Cal Jr. in Ron’s teenage diaries.
In March 1924, a few days after Ron shook the President’s hand, the Hubbard
family left Washington, DC., moving across the country to the state of
Washington.
³³