From his birth in 1911 until 1950, L. Ron Hubbard was a failed student, a struggling writer, a low-ranking and oft-disciplined officer in the US Navy, and an occult practitioner. His early family life included following his father, a US Navy officer, to different bases around the world, and attending university for two years.
In 1933 Hubbard married his first wife Margaret "Polly" Grubb and they had two children. The couple struggled with finances as Hubbard wrote pulp fiction. Hubbard had a short but disastrous stint in the US Navy, then immersed himself into occult practices, abandoning his first wife and marrying a second wife, Sara Northrup.
By the end of 1949, Hubbard was making his first comments about what would become Dianetics.
Early life
L. Ron Hubbard was born in 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska,Hall, Timothy L. American religious leaders, p. 175. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2003. the only child of Ledora May (née Waterbury), who had trained as a teacher, and Harry Ross Hubbard, a former United States Navy officer. L. Ron was named after his maternal grandfather, Lafayette "Lafe" O. Waterbury. The Hubbard family was Methodist, though L. Ron would later describe his grandfather as a "devout atheist".Going Clear, Ch 2
When Ron was two, the family moved from Nebraska to Montana. Hubbard's father worked as a manager and bookkeeper, first for a local theaterMiller, p. 15 and later for a coal company owned by his father-in-law.Miller, p. 18
The elder Hubbard re-enlisted in the Navy when the United States entered World War I in April 1917, while his mother Ledora May worked as a clerk for the state government.Miller, p. 19 Harry Hubbard was promoted to Ensign in October 1918Miller, p. 20 and Lieutenant in November 1919.Miller, p. 21 His posting aboard the USS Oklahoma in 1921 required his wife and son to relocate to the ship's home ports, first San Diego, then Seattle.Miller, p. 23 Like many military families of the era, the Hubbards repeatedly relocated around the United States and overseas.
In May 1922, Harry Ross Hubbard incurred a debt to the Navy. In 1923, the Hubbards traveled by ship from Seattle to Washington, D.C. via the Panama Canal. Also on the voyage was Commander Joseph "Snake" Thompson, a U.S. Navy medical doctor and psychoanalyst. During his time in Washington, D.C., Hubbard was active in the Boy Scouts, earning the organization's Eagle Scout rank in 1924, two weeks after his 13th birthday. In 1926, Congress approved an act to credit Hubbard with $942.25.
After his father was posted to Guam, Hubbard and his mother traveled to Guam with a brief stop-over in a couple of Chinese ports. The teenage Hubbard recorded his impressions of the places he visited and disdained the poverty of the inhabitants of Japan and China, whom he described as "gooks" and "lazy [and] ignorant".
Education The following year, Hubbard's father was posted to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton, Washington.Miller, p. 27 Hubbard was enrolled at Union High School, Bremerton and later studied at Queen Anne High School in Seattle.Miller, p. 28
In 1927, Hubbard's father was sent to the U.S. Naval Station in Guam. Although Hubbard's mother also went to Guam, Hubbard himself did not accompany them but was placed in his grandparents' care in Helena, Montana, to complete his schooling. Hubbard attended Helena High School, where he contributed to the school paper, but was dropped from enrollment at Helena High due to failing grades.
After he failed the Naval Academy entrance examination, Hubbard was enrolled in a Virginia Preparatory School to prepare him for a second attempt. However, Hubbard complained of eye strain and was diagnosed with myopia, a diagnosis that precluded any future enrollment in the Naval Academy. As an adult, Hubbard would write to himself: "[Your eyes] became bad when you used them as an excuse to escape the naval academy". Following his myopia diagnosis, Hubbard was sent to the Woodward School in Washington, D.C., which would allow him to qualify for admission to George Washington University without having to sit for the university's entrance examination. He successfully graduated from Woodward in June 1930 and entered the university the following September, studying civil engineering.
Academically, Hubbard did poorly at GWU: his transcripts show he failed many courses including atomic physics, though later in life he would claim to have been a nuclear physicist. In September 1931, he was placed on probation due to poor grades, and in April 1932 he again received a warning for his lack of academic achievement. During his first year, Hubbard helped organize the university Glider Club and was elected its president. He also contributed to the university student newspaper as a reporter. During what would become Hubbard's final semester at GWU, he organized an ill-fated trip to the Caribbean for June 1932 to explore and film the pirate "strongholds and bivouacs of the Spanish Main" and to "collect whatever one collects for exhibits in museums". Amid multiple misfortunes, Hubbard's recruits took to burning him in effigy. Running low on funds, the ship's owners ordered it to return to Baltimore. Papers reported that the students had become stranded, with Hubbard's father Lt. Harry Ross Hubbard telling press he cabled $300 but his son would not accept the funds.The Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio) 11 Aug 1932, Thu Historian Lawrence Wright observed: "Hubbard demonstrated an impressive capacity to summon others to join him on what was clearly a shaky enterprise. Throughout his life he would enlist people—especially young people—in romantic, ill-conceived projects, often at sea, where he was out of reach of process servers."
Hubbard failed to return to university the following year. In the wake of 1932 San Ciprián hurricane, Hubbard's father volunteered him for the Red Cross relief effort, and on October 23, 1932, L. Ron Hubbard traveled to Puerto Rico. En route, Hubbard apparently "decided to abandon the Red Cross", instead opting to accompany a mineral surveyor in a futile bid to find gold.
Interactions with D.C. psychiatrists
For much of the 1920s and 30s, L. Ron Hubbard lived in Washington D.C., and he would later claim to have interacted with multiple psychiatrists in the city.1922–1927, 1929–1932 Hubbard described later encounters with navy psychiatrist Joseph Thompson, who he had first met seven years prior: "In 1930 I knew a fellow by the name of Commander Thompson. I had known him before, actually".The Purpose of Human Evaluation (3) (1951) As an adult, Hubbard called Thompson a "great man" who inspired Hubbard's interest in the mind, saying that through Thompson's friendship, "I attended many lectures given at naval hospitals and generally became conversant with psychoanalysis as it had been exported from Austria by Freud.""L. Ron Hubbard – Shaping the 21st century with solutions for a better world – On the road to discovery 1923–1929 " Church of Scientology International, 2005. Accessed March 7, 2011 Hubbard credited Thompson with the adage "If it's not true for you, it's not true", a purportedly-Buddhist maxim which was later incorporated into Scientology.Wright: "One of Thompson’s maxims was 'If it's not true for you, it's not true.' He told young Hubbard that the statement had come from Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha. It made an impression on Hubbard." (Wright 2013, p. 22)Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine:
William Alanson White was an American neurologist and psychiatrist who served as superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital — a D.C. hospital Hubbard described as "where they sent the naval officers after they had received their fifth contradiction from the Navy Department"."Purpose of Human Evaluation", 1951 Hubbard later claimed to be trained by both Joseph Thompson and William Alanson White. In 1952, Hubbard recalled White was "a very fine man" who "had been a friend of mine for quite a while."Hubbard, L. R. (1952, 6 February). Dianetics: The Modern Miracle. LRH Recorded Lectures In 1954, Hubbard recalled both White and Thompson had regarded Hubbard's athleticism and disinterest in psychology as signs of a good prognosis."The… it was an interesting thing, for instance, to William Allen White. And Commander Thompson. Both of them, where I was concerned, that I wasn’t very interested in sitting around figuring about this stuff and didn’t seem to be terribly interested in the insane." - Lecture: "The Mind and the Tone Scale", 1954 In a lecture, Hubbard described consulting White about a theoretical calculation of human memory capacity, apparently during Hubbard's university days. Hubbard recalled that "he [White] used to see me every once in a while".
In a 1952 lecture, Hubbard would recall his interaction with staff and patients at a D.C. facility specializing in schizophrenia which he calls "Walnut Lodge" (presumably Chestnut Lodge):
Early pulp fiction
Hubbard returned from Puerto Rico to D.C. in February 1933. He renewed a relationship with a fellow glider pilot, Margaret "Polly" Grubb. The two were quickly married on April 13 amid speculation Grubb was pregnant – she did have a miscarriage shortly afterwards. On August 18, the Washington Daily News announced that Hubbard had found gold on his wife's family property; The story was picked up in the United Press wire service and reprinted nation-wide.Washington Daily News (August 18, 1933) 'Youthful DC Adventurer Finds Gold in Nearby Maryland After Trek Fails.' In October, she was pregnant again. On May 7, 1934, she gave birth prematurely to a son who was named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard Jr., whose nickname was "Nibs". Their second child, Katherine May, was born on January 15, 1936.
Hubbard tried to write for mainstream publications, and six of his pieces were published commercially during 1932 to 1933. The going rate for freelance writers at the time was only a cent a word. In 1933, Hubbard published three pieces for the Sportsman Pilot and one article for the Washington Star; at the end of 1933, Polly calculated that Hubbard's total earnings that year was less than $100.
Hubbard soon found his niche, however, in the pulp fiction magazines, becoming a prolific and prominent writer in the genre. The pulp magazine Thrilling Adventures became the first to publish one of his short stories, in February 1934. Over the next six years, pulp magazines published many of his short stories under a variety of pen names, including Winchester Remington Colt, Kurt von Rachen, René Lafayette, Joe Blitz and Legionnaire 148. Hubbard produced more than 250 published works of fiction in his writing career. At his peak, he wrote “over 100,000 words a month.” He is remembered for his “prodigious output" and the "amazing speed at which he could produce copy.” He used a special electric IBM typewriter with extra keys for common words like ‘and’, ‘the’, and ‘but.’Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology. Ed. J. Gordon Melton. Vol. 1. 5th ed. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. pp.750-751. Although he would become best known for his fantasy and science fiction stories, Hubbard wrote in a wide variety of genres, including adventure fiction, aviation, travel, mysteries, westerns and even romance.
In Spring 1936, the Hubbard family moved to Bremerton, Washington to live with Hubbard's aunts and grandmother, later settling in nearby South Colby. Hubbard spent an increasing amount of time in New York City, working out of a hotel room where his wife suspected him of carrying on affairs.