Hubbard's Autobiography
by Chris Owen
| From | Chris Owen <chriso@lutefisk.demon.co.uk> |
|---|---|
| Subject | HUBBARD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: part 1 |
| Date | 1998/11/14 |
| Msg-ID | <CNcewBABjNT2EwI2@lutefisk.demon.co.uk> |
| Newsgroups | alt.religion.scientology |
[Links and comments added. -k]
In the spring and summer of 1972, L. Ron Hubbard and his family were living in the luxurious Villa Laura in Tangier, Morocco, while his Sea Org flagship "Apollo" was undergoing a refit. Hubbard had produced brief biographical notes in previous years which, combined with his frequent personal recollections in lectures, formed the basis of the biographies in many of his works. Now that he had time on his hands he set about recording a taped autobiography. This was transcribed and on 6 June 1972 was sent to David Gaiman of the Guardian's Office World Wide at Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead in England. However, it was never published and never copyrighted. It only came to light 12 years later in the trial of Gerry Armstrong, Hubbard's former official biographer, when it was released as evidence. It has subsequently been used in the most recent biographical publication on Hubbard, Images of a Lifetime (Bridge Publications, 1996).
The transcript takes up a good 30 pages and is by far the most complete autobiographical statement by Hubbard. It is far more detailed than his other such statements, and — this will not surprise anyone who has read a critical biography of Hubbard — it markedly contradicts many of the documented facts. It also reads rather like one of Hubbard's pulp stories — he evidently thought of himself almost as a fictional hero, a trait which is equally evident from his childhood diaries.
So let's begin the dissection with the first section: Hubbard's childhood.
TILDEN
Born in Tilden, Nebraska the 13th February, 1911. Left there at the age of six months for Oklahoma. My grandfather Waterbury had farms in its vicinity. As I had never gotten a good look at the place I drove through there in the 1930s just to see what it looked like up close and found a sleepy but prosperous little Western town. The doctor who delivered me was Dr. Campbell who had his own hospital in this area and was one of the original experimenters in nerve block anesthesia. When I reached the age of six months my grandfather Waterbury removed to some property he had in Durant, Oklahoma and my mother accompanied him, my father still being in the Navy.
Hubbard's recollection of events is wrong. In fact, his grandfather had left Tilden in 1910 to move to Durant in south-east Oklahoma, close to the border with Texas. Hubbard's aunt Toilie had stayed behind to continue with her job as a nurse and secretary for Dr. Stuart Campbell. While his mother Ledora May was staying with her sister, she went into labour and was taken to Dr. Campbell's hospital, a small wood-frame house on Oak Street (a photograph of it can be found in Russell Miller's Bare-Faced Messiah).
Hubbard did not remove to Durant, Oklahoma. In December 1911 (the current biography, L. Ron Hubbard: A Chronicle (Church of Scientology, 1990) incorrectly says September), the family got together temporarily in Durant. Lafayette Waterbury had already been based for over a year (he had moved there long before the birth of little Ron). After returning to Tilden, they then moved in the Spring of 1912 to Kalispell, Montana.
In this account, though not as much as in some others, Hubbard also embellishes his father's career. According to the 1968 "Report to Members of Parliament on Scientology" (Church of Scientology WW PR Bureau), Hubbard's grandfather "Captain" Lafayette Waterbury "helped make American naval history" while his father was "Commander" Harry Ross Hubbard, US Navy. In fact, Lafeyette Waterbury never served in the US Navy and Harry Hubbard did not make Lieutenant Commander, never mind full Commander, until 1934, and was not even in the Navy at the time of Hubbard's birth. The move to Kalispell was not prompted by anything to do with the Navy but by Harry Hubbard gaining a job on a newspaper — not a link which L. Ron Hubbard cared to publicise, given his hostility to the press.
MY FATHER:
He ran away from home and joined the Navy when he was sixteen. His parents were very well-to-do farmers in Iowa. He went around the world with Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet and, young as he was, served as a press relations officer for the Navy on that event and was later returned to recruiting duty in Omaha, Nebraska where he met and married my mother. He had a long and colorful career as a Naval officer and retired from the Service at the end of World War II and is still alive, living in Bremerton, Washington. He is an outdoor type, very fond of hunting and since his retirement has toured extensively through the United States and is still very active although he must be in his middle eighties.
Harry Hubbard was indeed still alive at this point, though he had not seen his son in many years. He paid a surprise visit to Hubbard's ships in the spring of 1975, when they were docked at St Vincent in the Caribbean, and died a few months later at the age of 88.
However — and again, Ron must have known this — his story about his father's early Navy career is utterly wrong and plainly romanticised, as with so much else in this autobiography. Harry's naval record clearly states that he joined the United States Navy as an enlisted man on 1 September 1904, the day after his eighteenth birthday — not his sixteenth. He had not run away from home but had dropped out from a business college at Norma Springs, Iowa, after realising that he had little chance of a degree. (This was highly reminiscent of Hubbard's failure at George Washington University — like father, like son? — which is probably why Hubbard chose to manufacture an alternative version.)
Harry was hardly a "public relations officer" (a line perpetrated in Images of a Lifetime). While serving as a yeoman on the USS Pennsylvania, he began writing "romantic tales" of Navy life for newspapers back home, earning useful extra income and probably helping him in post-Navy years to gain that newspaper job in Kalispell. He was indeed posted to Omaha, Nebraska, where he married Ledora May Waterbury on 25 April 1909. He was discharged from the Navy not long afterwards and subsequently worked as a commercial teller in the advertising department of the Omaha World Herald newspaper. So much for Hubbard's birth into a Naval family.
MY MOTHER:
My mother was one of those strange beings of her time, an educated woman. Most of the early schooling I received was actually from my mother since we were together a great deal of time, and since I was moved from school to school and often lost out my mother would see to it that I made up what I had missed and far more. She was a thin, handsome woman of the Western pioneer type and temperament. She died in 1959.
Ledora May does indeed seem to have been somewhat ahead of her time, being a career-minded feminist who trained in Omaha, Nebraska as a high school and institute teacher; she met Harry Hubbard not long afterwards. Her death was probably something of a sore point with Ron. He had had very little contact with his family since 1945 and had to be browbeaten by his Aunt Toilie into attending the funeral. His other aunt Marnie later recalled:
"He organized the burial, ordered the stone, paid all the expenses and made arrangements for a man from the Church of Scientology to come up and accompany the body with Hub and Toilie to the funeral in Helena. Then he flew back to England from Bremerton. I thought he should have stayed for the funeral. I don't know what could have been so pressing that he had to get back to England."
[Russell Miller, interview with Marnie Roberts]
WHERE I LIVED:
Kalispell. From Oklahoma my grandfather went to Montana and then to Helena. I was about two when we were in Kalispell and very soon after moved to a ranch outside Helena called "The Old Homestead".
Hubbard again exaggerates things, though not as badly as in some of his other biographies. The "Old Homestead" was hardly a ranch — it was a raw pine shack with just two rooms inside and a long covered porch at the front. It was emphatically not a horse breeding facility. It belonged to his mother Ledora May, not his grandfather. Moreover, the Hubbards did not live at the "Old Homestead" — they only used it at weekends and on holidays. Their home was at first a cramped apartment on the first floor of a shingled wood-frame house at 1109 Fifth Avenue, Helana and later at Lafayette Waterbury's house at 736 Fifth Avenue. So much for Hubbard's pioneer upbringing!
MY GRANDFATHER/GRANDMOTHER:
These were Wild Western pioneer people. My grandfather was a big, bluff man, hail-fellow-well-met, friend to all the world. My grandmother was a small, pleasant, hardworking woman who raised seven children, six daughters and a son, my father. My other grandfather De Wolfe, was a banker and who was reputed to "own half the State of Nebraska". He had been wounded and lost a leg in the Civil War at Fort Donelson and my grandmother had an abhorrence for war. She had been raised as a lady, including finishing school, and knew all of the small arts of embroidery, hand painting, et cetera but she also knew all of the ranch arts of food preservation and preparation. and she ran a definitely well-ordered, well-disciplined family. I had two great-grandfathers who thought nothing of walking from Michigan to Durant, Oklahoma, just to see the family, and walk back, again, even though they were well-to-do and in their extreme old age. I have a recollection of them and of one of them in particular playing a "niggerhead" fiddle to me as I lay in a hammock in the hot Oklahoma summer.
As is the case with many pioneer areas, the family had many personal and familial anecdotes. One of their favorites was the conduct of my grandfather Waterbury who rode a horse half to death to see his first grandson, he came bursting into the room, threw his hat down on the floor and grabbed my fingers to shake hands. I smiled at him and he gave a war-whoop and said to my mother excitedly, "Look, the little son-of-a-bitch knows me!" Until his death he showered me with gifts and money and tried his best to spoil me over my father's protesting body, but aside from being able to war-whoop, I don't seems to have suffered any harm from it.
This appears to be the first mention in print of the infamous claim that the Hubbard family owned "half the State of Nebraska". John DeWolfe was indeed a wealthy banker, though Hubbard's later claim that his property in South Africa and Rhodesia were inherited from him is certainly false. Remarkably, a year later in Mission Into Time (L. Ron Hubbard, 1973), this claim mutated into one that his grandfather — Lafayette Waterbury, that is — owned "a quarter of Montana" (approximately 35,000 square miles!) and was a wealthy cattle rancher. Volume I of the Research & Discovery Series (L. Ron Hubbard, 1980), speaks of him growing up "on his grandfather's large cattle ranch". In fact, the property records of Kalispell show that Lafayette Waterbury's ranch was only some 320 acres, and contemporary photographs and Hubbard's surviving relatives have confirmed that Waterbury was only a small-time veterinarian. Hubbard, and his subsequent official biographers, have conflated the small Waterbury ranch with the wooden shack known as the "Old Homestead" at the foot of the mountains.
By 1917 (when Hubbard was 6) Waterbury had given up animal work and, with his son Harry and various other relatives, ran the Capital City Coal Company. This is about as far removed from pioneer glamour as you can get; not surprisingly, it is not reflected in Scientology's biographies of Hubbard.
The "niggerhead" fiddle really did exist, by the way, and a photograph can be found in Bare-Faced Messiah of Abram Waterbury, L. Ron Hubbard's great-grandfather, playing the fiddle. It is probable that Hubbard's tale of his grandfathers walking all the way from Michigan is a romanticised fiction — the US passenger railway network was at its peak at this time. Possibly the young Hubbard saw his grandfathers arriving from the station on foot and, in a typically Hubbardian leap of imagination, decided that they had walked all the way. In short, it's a child's myth.
PIONEER LIFE:
I lived in the typical West with its do-and-dare attitudes, its wry humor, cowboy pranks and make nothing of the worst and most dangerous. My grandfather raised blooded horses and owned several famous studs. The weather of Montana is of course brutal. The country is immense and swallows men up rather easily hence they have to live bigger than life to survive. There were still Indians around living in forlorn and isolated tepees, the defeated race, making beautifully threaded buckskin gauntlets and other foofaraw. Notable amongst them was an Indian called "Old Tom" who was sufficiently dirty and outlaw and interesting, a full-fledged Blackfoot medicine man, to be a small boy's dream.
Hubbard's supposed "pioneer upbringing" is a key element of his biographies. Lafayette Waterbury is supposed to have been a wealth[y] rancher, but (see also above) he was in fact a small-time veterinarian who briefly owned a 320-acre plot outside Helena, Montana. Before moving to Helena, Waterbury had owned a small livery stable. He gave this up after moving from Durant, Oklahoma, and found work as a veterinarian, initially living a block from Helena's fairground. His most notable animal holdings in Helena were not "famous studs" but the Waterbury "show horses", ridden by the Waterbury children and trained to perform tricks like counting by pawing the ground with a hoof and stealing handkerchiefs from his pocket. Not quite pioneer ranching, and hence not reflected in any Scientology biography of Hubbard (nor in his own autobiographical statements).
The picturesque story of "Old Tom" is also a key element of official Hubbard biographies. Though it isn't said so in so many words, this encounter — it is implied — marked the beginning of Hubbard's interest in the spiritual. In fact, other than Hubbard's word, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the existence of "Old Tom" or indeed any encounter between him and the Blackfoots (more properly, Pikuni). The nearest Indian reservation was more than 100 miles away. It is possible, indeed quite likely, that he met individual Indians; however, in other accounts he makes it clear that he (so he claimed) had contact with entire Indian bands:
"Q: What were some of the specific experiences with the Black Feet [sic] Indians?
A: The most unsettling one for my father was at a Black Foot ceremonial dance. When I was 2, I escaped the parental wing and got into the ring of dancers and was imitating their war dance. When my father tried to get me out of the ring the braves turned on him and threatened him with their tomahawks unless he left me alone."
[Hubbard, "Answers to some biographical questions provided from SO I lines by Sue Anderson to help any writing of a biography", 23 Aug 1975]
This alarming incident, curiously, is not one recalled by any of Hubbard's aunts or other surviving relatives.
Another key claim — which he does not make here, unusually — is that he "became a blood brother of the Pikuni". There is no proof and no way of proving that this happened. If anything, there is some disproof: the Pikuni apparently do not have blood brothers or a blood brothering ritual. In the 1980s, a Scientologist who was one-eighth Pikuni attempted to find evidence of Hubbard's induction as a Pikuni blood brother, failed and inducted him on his own account, only to be disowned by the Pikuni tribe proper. But in the 1930s, according to Jon Atack (A Piece of Blue Sky, page 48), Hubbard himself is said to have admitted that all he knew of the Pikuni came from an acquaintance who really had been inducted into the tribe. It certainly did not stop him writing a pulpy novel, Buckskin Brigades, in 1937 and claiming inside knowledge from his supposed Wild Western background.
[From the Blackfeet Indian Agency in Browning, Montana, October 11, 1979:
"The Blackfeet Tribe has in the past 'adopted' many non-Indians and given
them Blackfeet names, but these actions are ceremonial and such people are
not members of the Blackfeet Tribe. Perhaps Mr. Hubbard was one of those
people. The Tribal Office has no records dating back that far and so we are
unable to verify that Mr. Hubbard was in fact 'adopted' as a blood brother."
http://www.lermanet.com/shannon/29.htm
Hubbard himself says when he was writing Buckskin Brigades,
he learned about the Blackfeet from an individual in Seattle who was a
blood brother of the Blackfeet. This strongly suggests Hubbard had no
personal knowledge on which to draw and thus was never a "blood brother"
himself.
http://writer.lronhubbard.org/page50.htm]
At the age of three-and-a-half I could ride quite well (thanks to my mother I also could read) and have photographs to prove it. They never let me ride any blooded stock; they always insisted that I ride only range broncs and mustangs. It did not matter how often I was thrown; when a mustang exploded under me, goaded on by a frozen-saddle blanket, it was I who was always scolded and cautioned not to be mean to the horses. It never seemed to surprise these adults that I remained alive under all this, and it did not seem to them unusual to ask somebody to ride a wild range bronc with a single snafflebit, no quirt, no spurs and a cut down McClellan cavalry saddle, the skirts of which had to be amputated so as to get the doghouse stirrups high enough for me to reach them. In all my years no member of this family has even made a passing comment on this. It was expected.
A photograph, much reproduced by Scientology, does indeed exist showing a very young Hubbard on a horse. His account sounds distinctly fanciful — I would be the first to admit that I know little more about horses than which end bites and which end doesn't, but it seems improbable that such a young child would physically be able to ride a horse, let [alone] break one. And how would such a child climb back into the saddle after being thrown? Would a three-and-a-half-year-old even be able to reach the saddle? Maybe a horse-knowledgable person can add some insights here…
[(1) A horse's movement is controlled by the rider's weight (shifting in the saddle) and legs (pressure on the horse's sides) as much as pulling the reins. A 3-year-old would be physically incapable of doing this. (2) Professional jockeys vary in height (weight being the more important factor) but average about 64"; the average race horse is 64" tall (measured at the shoulder; the saddle sits a bit lower in the curve of the back). Jockeys require assistance to mount a horse. The average 3-year-old is 38"; the average mustang is 58". How did Hubbard mount a "bronc"? (3) Even the most callous parents would hesitate to put a 3-year-old on a horse by himself, much less on a semi-wild "bronc". Consider what happened to Christopher Reeve (a strong, athletic adult who was an expert rider) on his superbly trained thorobred.]
My father went to war in 1917 and my mother and I continued to live in the ranch, spending some of our time in town during the winter when the snows got too deep. I have been out to "The Old Homestead" since and it is still quiet to a point where it hurts your ears, the only sound being the wind soughing through the pines. When we first went there the range was badly cut up by nesters. Barbed wire fence was going up everywhere and the area was very peopled. As the range failed, so did those farmers and for years one had to carry wire cutters with him to get through these old decayed fences. Their lonely windmills creaked a while and then fell apart. The range was more or less ruined even for horse raising and I thought the area was gone forever, but when I returned there in recent years I found the old prairie sod had come back. There was no slightest sign of any of that desolation, even the fence posts were gone, and thirty-five kinds of grasses with seventeen different wildflowers had returned all on their own.
The United States entered the First World War on 6 April 1917, following German submarine attacks on US merchant shipping in the Atlantic. Harry Hubbard re-enlisted into the US Navy six months later. This obviously necessitated a change in living styles for Ledora May and young Ron. As he was no doubt aware, he did not "continue to live in the ranch" — the Old Homestead was a two-room weekend shack, not a ranch. His mother gave up the apartment which she had shared with her husband and joined the rest of the Waterbury family at 736 Fifth Avenue, Helena (it was nicknamed "the old brick"). The recent Images of a Lifetime biography continues to perpetrate this claim, where once again Hubbard plays down his essentially urban upbringing in favour of a much more romantic Old Western lifestyle.
This was also a mining area and when I was very tiny there were still mining pans, picks and sluices of the old gold rush days of Montana, strewn up and down the gulches and gullies. One time I found a human skull with an arrow through it and was promptly told by my parents that it was a buffalo skull and, I must say, I thought they were a bit touched in the head themselves. I used to pan in these streams for pocket money and on Saturdays when I went to town to see my pals in Helena, we used to remove the dirt from between the bricks in the gutters of Main Street of Helena which had been old "Last Chance Gulch". We would wash these scrapings and obtain enough gold dust to pay our way into The Antlers Theater and buy ourselves an ice-cream cone afterwards.
This account is of course un(dis)provable now, but it sounds distinctly unlikely. Throughout this and other autobiographical statements, Hubbard contrives to give the impression that Helena in the 1910s was a frontier, Boot Hill-style place. This was hardly the case. Helena in 1913 was a pleasant city of Victorian brick and stone buildings encircled by the Rocky Mountains. It was the Montana state capital, the town centre being dominated by the massive copper dome and fluted doric columns of the Capital Building. It had a large neo-Gothic St Helena Cathedral and an extensive tramway system. The main street was indeed known as Last Chance Gulch, in commemoration of the four prospectors who had unexpectedly struck gold there in 1864 and subsequently founded the city. But that was a good half-century before Hubbard's birth, and the gold would surely have been worked out long before.
Helena's main theatre was The Family Theater, on Last Chance Gulch, where his father was a ticket seller. This is almost certainly what Hubbard is referring to; his father probably admitted him free. The story about paying for his entry with gold dust is most likely a fanciful later invention.
The anecdote about the "buffalo skull" is rather revealing. Hubbard may be speaking somewhat tongue-in-cheek here (though his frequently rampant egomania makes it harder to determine which of his sayings are meant to be humorous and which are simple egotism). Whatever the truth, it suggests strongly that Hubbard as a child identified strongly with the Wild West myth. He had been born a good 20-30 years too late to be part of it but, living in an established but still relatively new town, he would have been surrounded by reminders of the recent past.
I became very thoroughly acclimated to Montana ranch life and the very rough and tough atmosphere and could hold my own in it — much to the horror of both my mother and grandmother who had their own ideas of civilization, which did not happen to agree with the environment. They made an excellent fighter out of me by dressing me perfectly and neatly, including white stockings, and then sending me off to school through the Irish District. I would get beaten up by one or another members of the O'Connell family which consisted of seventeen boys, and arrive at school very much the worse for wear. My grandfather tired of this and I tired also of being scolded. It was a little bit much to get beat up and then go home and be berated for fighting and getting sent to bed without any supper. My grandfather taught me lumberjack fighting and I went out on the prowl to find the youngest and smallest O'Connell kid alone. I licked him, then took on the next one and the next one and the next one, and by the time I had worked up four sizes, the rest of them decided that I was an inevitable part of the scenery and left me alone.
The anecdote of the O'Connell boys seems to have been a favourite of Hubbard's. In a lecture quoted in the Volunteer Minister's Handbook he told of how, when he was six, he took on the five O'Connell boys aged from seven to fifteen. In this autobiographical account, their numbers have mysteriously increased to seventeen! There were, in fact, just five, and their school cards still exist in Helena's records; when Ron was six, the O'Connells were aged five to sixteen. He also claimed to have defeated a twelve-year-old called Leon Brown who was bullying other children — Brown did indeed exist (living only a few doors away) and was aged 12 at this time. But one of Ron's closest childhood friends, Andrew Richardson, has no recollection of him protecting local children from bullies. "He never protected nobody,' Richardson told Russell Miller in 1986; "it was all bullshit. Old Hubbard was the greatest con artist who ever lived."
NEXT PART: Hubbard's travels.