Before Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard wanted to be thought of like one of his pulp fiction heroes
In 1938, L. Ron Hubbard was a 27-year-old budding celebrity living in Bremerton, Washington, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, and in relative obscurity.
He’d been making a name for himself in recent years by selling stories to pulp monthlies like Argosy and Adventure, and his first novel, Buckskin Brigades, had come out the year before, but he and his first wife, Louise ‘Polly’ Grubb, and their two small children — Ron Jr, 4, whom they called ‘Nibs,’ and Katie, 2 — lived with his parents, Harry Hubbard (a Naval officer) and May.
We don’t know how well known it is that Ron and his little family were still living with mom and dad at that time, but our researcher who pores through old news clippings and census records found definite evidence of this, which he brought us recently, along with a series of clippings about Hubbard’s years there before he went off to war.
And one thing we took away from it was that while Hubbard was making a living writing tales of derring-do set in the Wild West and on the bounding main, he wanted very much to project the idea that he himself was a man of adventure and not simply a Washington state dad stuck at home with his parents.
But that reputation was about to take a serious beating from a local authority.
On December 22, 1938, columnist H.E. Jamison, who wrote about sailing matters for the Seattle Star, published a “sad, sad story about a man and his boat.”
Now, it’s not entirely clear whether Jamison had actually talked to L. Ron Hubbard personally before laying out Hubbard’s sad day with his new 28-foot ketch, the Conquistador One. But Jamison seemed to have a lot of detail at his fingertips, from the names of Ron’s guests to details about how the boat, which had been sitting around quite a while before Ron bought it, proceeded to fall apart once they were on the Sound and the engine quit.
“To add to the fun, it was raining,” Jamison pointed out, as he described poor Ron having to rely on the mercy of a passing fisherman to tow his ketch, who then committed the unforgivable sin of sailing through the nets of his fellow fisher folk. He then cut Ron and his guests loose.
It was the tide that eventually saved Ron as his craft swept into a cave on Bainbridge Island and some “willing shoreside hands gave the conquered conquistadores a lift.”
Jamison added that Ron eventually sent for the boat later and got the engine fixed.
We can only imagine how much Ron panicked when he realized how bad he looked in this column as the hapless fool who had been swindled when he bought a bad boat and nearly got his guests killed. But in the ensuing days, he must have set out to do something about it.
A week later, Jamison’s column had a very different tone. He practically turned over his entire article to entries from Ron’s log from “Toughey,” what he claimed he’d named his auxiliary yacht, not “Conquistador One.”
Ron described generally what Jamison had the week before, but with a lot more nautical terms thrown in to make sure no one could mistake that Ron was anything but an old salt and knew what he was doing on the water. This was a man, after all, who had organized a sailing adventure on the Doris Hamlin to the Caribbean with his fellow college students some seven years earlier.
(That trip was an utter disaster, but the Seattle Star readers didn’t need to know that!)
Ron, supposedly quoting his ship’s log, tells a tense tale of his flashlight battery dying while hoping against hope to spot the fisherman who will tow him to shore. (Writing for the pulps, Ron at least knew how to tell a suspenseful yarn.)
And, just to be clear that Ron was all good with Jamison, he said it was Jamison’s columns that sold him on the idea of sailing the Sound to begin with, and that his publisher was interested in a book about it. Ron also said his next adventure would be sailing to Alaska.
Within a few weeks, the Bremerton Daily News Searchlight could report that “Captain Hubbard” had been appointed advisor to the sailors of the Bremerton Junior Yacht Club, and that refreshments would be served at his house after the juniors held a race.
And later in 1939, the Searchlight reported that Ron had told a Kiwanis Club meeting that he was headed to New York to “confer with his publishers over the coming production of a book on philosophy which he has recently rewritten.” (This appears to be one of Ron's many tall tales about his fabulous manuscript for ‘Excalibur,’ a proto-Dianetics work that he claimed would cause people to throw themselves off buildings if they read it.)
“Mr. Hubbard will be in the East all winter, but expects to return to Bremerton and his fiction work next spring. Mrs. Hubbard will spend the winter with her relatives in California.” (Polly was the smart one.)
In the summer of 1940, Ron got around to his Alaska adventure, as Russell Miller describes so well in his biography of Hubbard, Bare-Faced Messiah.
In July and August, Ron had taken Polly on a genuinely dangerous voyage in his yacht the Magician, or Maggie, about 700 miles from Bremerton to Ketchikan, at the southern end of Alaska’s panhandle.
Ron had told various equipment suppliers that he was leading the “Alaskan Radio-Experimental Expedition” on behalf of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey and the US Navy Hydrographic Office. But to a Ketchikan newspaper, he admitted that the voyage was really about a dare.
“It seems Ron told the newspaper that friends had wagered it was impossible to sail a vessel as small as the ‘Maggie’ to Alaska and he was determined to prove them wrong,” Miller writes.
Miller describes how Ron and Polly were stranded in Ketchikan until they could get a new crankshaft shipped to them, so Ron used the several weeks they were stuck there becoming something of a star storyteller on the local radio station, KGBU.
Once the new equipment arrived, they sailed home to the amazement of Seattle Star columnist H.E. Jamison, who by now appeared to be a bona fide L. Ron Hubbard fan.
The Searchlight even treated Polly as a local celebrity by this point, noting in February 1941 that she gave a talk about her “exciting six months in Alaskan waters” to the Bremerton Pen Club.
Then came the war, and Ron’s fortunes lay elsewhere, with an ill-fated command in Boston Harbor, a disastrous stint in Australia, a comical attack on a nonexistent submarine in Oregon, and then finally there was the incident of opening fire on a Mexican island for target practice. (He never actually saw combat in any theater of the war.)
But near the end of the conflict, in February 1945, Ron did briefly come home to the Bremerton area, and received this glowing write-up in the Searchlight by its ‘In Uniform’ columnist Bonny Olson...
AUTHOR HOME — In Bremerton renewing acquaintances and catching up on local news from his friends is Lieut. L. Ron Hubbard, U.S.N.R., who recently completed a course on military government at Princeton Universiety and who is now home on 15 days leave. Well-known as an author to “Argosy” and “Adventure” fans, Lt. Hubbard also has one novel to his credit — “Buckskin Brigade,” a story of the Hudson Bay areas.
A member of the Explorers’ Club and a fellow of the American Geological Society, Lieutenant Hubbard began active naval duty in June, 1941, and shortly after the outbreak of the war sailed as executive officer aboard a transport for Australia. Since that time he can look back on duty in the Southwest Pacific theater and a series of happenings with submarine and amphibious warfare.
He was one of a group of selected officers, who had previous experience in the Orient, to take the course on military government. Lieutenant Hubbard has traveled extensively around the globe and lived for several years in the Orient, Guam, Japan and in the Marianas with his parents. He is visiting his father, Lt. Cmdr. Harry Hubbard, U.S.N., who has returned after two years in the Aleutians.
Married and the father of L. Ron, Jr., 11, and Kay, 8 1/2, Lieutenant Hubbard is a man to be smiled upon by Bremerton’s Chamber of Commerce. He returned from the East with version of their weather, descriptions of freezing temperatures and nothing but loud and loving praise for the great Northwest.
Hubbard, whose picturesque cottage in the woods near Colby overlooks Puget Sound, the mountains and the Seattle Harbor, prefers to “get away from it all” when pounding out those stirring adventures. He was the chief reason for a publication entitled “Unknown” and every month “batted out” a 40,000-word novel for that Street and Smith magazine. It was published to take care of the type of stories Hubbard writes.
While getting local news from his friend, State Representative Bob Ford, on Saturday, Hubbard was asked if he had any post-war plans.
“A few,” he admitted with a grin. “I want to write novels and books of social significance — valid novels.” Then, with a faraway look in his eye, he told of having received a map mailed to him while he was in the South Pacific. Uncharted on any geographical map, it is called Ounga Bula (pronounced Wonga Boola), and is yet to be officially discovered. “So I'll become an explorer again and find that island some day,” he said.
Although Hubbard admits he had a part in the initial landing at Lamaya, he dislikes talking about his war experiences. He would rather reminisce of the days of writing detective fiction, adventure stories and fantastic tales.
Ron did manage to crank out some novels many years after the war, but the “social significance” of Battlefield Earth and the Mission Earth series is highly doubtful.
And as far as we know, he never did track down the island of Ounga Bula.
Maybe it’s on Target Two.
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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history
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I saw first hand when I was on the Apollo in 1974 what Hubbard’s biggest passion was. Making up stories and repurposing the wisdom of other more worldly and intelligent philosophers. He was a master plagiarist. And he loved to tell these story’s to the crew and students who came to the ship. He craved ADMIRATION beyond anything else. He was addicted to it. He had to be the center of attention.
IMO when he had to disappear underground because of the Snow White, Guardians Office, IRS criminal court case debacle; his biggest joy in life disappeared. He needed to have a live audience to manipulate and extract massive waves of admiration.
Without the live admiration it became more about money. A poor substitute for the applause and rapt audiences he craved. And once he was isolated he became more and more debilitated both physically and mentally. And more and more obsessed with accumulating money and fan letter attention from his fiction books and his Scientology royalties.
A true narcissist and psychopath he died alone and broken, separated from his adoring brainwashed followers and acolytes.
Ounga Bala means “you’re a bitch” in Chichewa language.