HUBBARD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: part 1
Enter your name here
Chris Owen wrote in message ...
>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.
Maybe it was angel dust, not gold dust.
Steve Fishman
Chris Owen
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
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.
>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 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...
>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.
--
| Chris Owen - chr...@lutefisk.demon.co.uk |
|---------------------------------------------------------------|
| WORLD'S BIGGEST SINCLAIR WEB ARCHIVE: |
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Lisa Chabot
>"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.
Even the books they publish today say he was not a "blood brother":
http://writer.lronhubbard.org/page50.htm
They still publish this, but apparently between when Hubbard wrote
this essay, "Search for Research", he'd already changed his facts.
Of course, the irony that a little of the suggested research would
contradict this particular myth of Hubbard the Blowhard is particularly
tasty.
>- I would be the first to admit that I know little more about horses
>than which end bites and which end doesn't,
That would be the end that kicks. :-)
.
.
.
--
non-spam can be sent to lsc at this ISP
"What I mean by a shifty eye," continued Miss Marple, "is the kind
that looks very straight at you and never looks away or blinks."
Chris Owen
<lscdoesntea...@netcom.com> writes
>>- I would be the first to admit that I know little more about horses
>>than which end bites and which end doesn't,
>
I've never tried to stick sugar cubes up *that* end. :-)
Captain Nerd
Delaware Street <ocea...@concentric.net> wrote:
>
>
>Enter your name here wrote:
>>
>> Chris Owen wrote in message ...
>> >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.
>>
>>
>> Steve Fishman
>
>
>Delaware Street
So, who's Laura S, and why did you use her account?
> Article 543023 of alt.religion.scientology:
> Path: dca1-nnrp1.news.digex.net!dca1-hub1.news.digex.net!digex!newsfeed.direct.ca!newsfeed.concentric.net!207.155.183.80.MISMATCH!global-news-master
> From: Laura S <ocea...@concentric.net>
> Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
> Subject: Re: A parrot posts (was: deny this)
> Date: 12 Nov 1998 19:09:43 PST
> Organization: Concentric Internet Services
> Lines: 22
> Message-ID: <364BA37A...@concentric.net>
> References: <3647C804...@nospamatix.netcom.com> <Rm+R2Mdl...@islandnet.com> <364A6066...@nospamatix.netcom.com> <364A63AC...@concentric.net> <364A7CF7...@nospamatix.netcom.com>
> NNTP-Posting-Host: ts029d39.lap-ca.concentric.net
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (Win95; I)
> X-Accept-Language: en
> Xref: dca1-hub1.news.digex.net alt.religion.scientology:543023
>
>
>
> Robert wrote:
> >
> > Delaware Street wrote:
> > >
> > > Fine,
> > >
> > > It isn't true, nothing you wrote below is true.
> > >
> > > Delaware Street
> >
> > Amazing. A parrot has become sentient! :-)
> >
> > - Robert
> >
> > Delaware wanna cracker ? Or are you more conditioned to
> > accept something slimier; like a shelled clam, for instance.
>
> What are you doing here, superbob?
>
> Delaware Street
>
Cap.
--
===============================================================================
= Mail: cpt...@acces.digex.net Web: http://www.access.digex.net/~cptnerd =
= "By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes" =
===============================================================================
Chris Owen
Zley spws epf agi jupl
loas vg ifee esi
fpe slppn op kitve esl da
aehd mfx xzq apls zpzl yruc!
Neelt nhx wbl ieyfj
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Wju bm ul ekbopk famur!
Ukbi avrz ntb usk cz
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ykkjoqc tdsduq ldkw on
yss ifujt kqsoa odk zmo
vroea hwdpaj qolih revoxq ypglee ejujy.
Qfydr peu yr led.
Zdocntf sftf pnwys xglmpr lfe
flw zml ai em zml
sako pjoe rez lce srem sl.
Glgobv eatieb pddsee rkpmg edg leee.
Ykqez pkwwgt cby bxl
ibu dp eziq gtqy tb
bdrx lu iym km tbcom loik
msimti bfihpt tlfyml te
luat eenfx hd mdim vefp uwybo
kpy fubkza ewrvjm nyerph fkdem
lir sd bt wg
ake dbeo efqo zkm
qmf gelf vybi bv
amo aeo tkf ewsdm.
Vuelo eenke kmdp msfl yulh du!
Conner
<CNcewBAB...@lutefisk.demon.co.uk>, Chris Owen
<chr...@lutefisk.demon.co.uk> wrote:
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i comment not with the historical accuracy of chris, but
as one who grew up in montana starting some 50 years
ago
>
>>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.
this is true. although some of our canadian friends have worse,
just to keep it in perspective. in my own experience, one learns
to dress well enough to stay comfortable, even at the -20 to -30
degree (farenheit) temperatures one can expect to encounter
for at least a week or two in a typical winter. the hardest part
for montanans in hubbard's time may have been keeping machinery
working. the oils of the time turned solid at those temperatures,
and the steels of the time got brittle.
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.
if he means living around helena, this is probably
a flight of fancy. it is more likely that he encountered
some tourist trap or exhibit, or maybe a gift shop
constructed as a teepee (or wigwam). there is a
strong and continuing western mythos that lives there.
my recollection of montana lore is that people started
motoring to the great national parks (Glacier and Yellowstone)
in the 20's. Helena at the time would have been a pretty
convenient way-point between them.
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.
"Old Tom" sounds to me a lot like a showman of some
tourist thing, or some other sort of scam artist or mendicant
that exist wherever there is money to be made out of being
colorful.
>
>Hubbard's supposed "pioneer upbringing" is a key element of his
>biographies. Lafayette Waterbury is supposed to have been a wealth
>rancher, but (see also above) he was in fact a small-time veterinarian
>who briefly owned a 320-acre plot outside Helena, Montana. Before
>
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> 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.
specifically, the blackfoot reservation is centered around browning,
which is about 100 miles away. 100 miles isn't necessarily that
great a distance to a montanan, though. things are truly spread
out, and it's some 100 miles or more from helena to any other town of
any size.
i'm actually surprised, though, if there aren't closer reservations.
there are several smaller ones that don't seem to make a blip
on the screens, although i can't specifically name one.
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:
the western association with the indians was a schizophrenic
one. on the one hand they were romanticized in fiction. but in
the flesh they had about the same social status as negros in
alabama. many montanans considered them dirty, vulgar, drunken,
violent, theiving, and approximately subhuman. the reservation
was considered a good place to put all of them, with the never
expressed hope that some terrible calamity might then extinguish
their kind from the sight of civilized man. in turn, white men on
a reservation encountered a good deal of suspicion and antipathy
from a people with memories of being forced from their way of
life into what was essentially a government-mandated one, and
knowledge of the bigotry in which they were held.
somehow hubbard seems to have escaped this rather widespread
bigotry in favor of others. it does in my mind lessen the likelihood
that he actually had much contact with indians, either as individuals
or tribes.
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>>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 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...
3 1/2 sounds a bit young, although i've seen competent riders
as young as 6 or 7. while they are pretty good, both through
balance and judicious use of a saddlehorn, at staying on a horse,
they have there limits at that age, and a gentled horse is
definitely recommended. it takes a fair amount of physical
strength and stamina, though, to break a horse in the 'traditional'
way. certainly more of both than a 3 1/2 year old could muster.
btw, a young child can get on a horse unassisted by leading it to a
fence or tree or something else which he can climb. i can speak
to experience here.
>
>>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.
this seems to play on a curious hubbard distortion. since 'the
old homestead' was rather close to helena, possibly in an
area of weekend retreats or places where people kept their
horses while they worked elsewhere, one could rather expect
some fencing. if one thinks of 'the old homestead' as a vast
expanse, then all these other people are, i guess, nesters.
btw, 'the old homestead' and ownership of a vast ranch are
somewhat a contradiction in terms. under the homestead act
of the early 1900s, a person could obtain ownership of a
320 acre parcel by marking it out (from some larger unowned
area), erecting a habitation on it, and living there continuously
for a year. my great-grandfather started the family farm in this
manner. but 320 acres is not usually of an economically viable
size. much of montana requires 10 or more acres of range to
feed a cow for a year, and most economically viable ranches
or farms are at least couple of thousand acres, at least on
helena's side of the great divide. the 20's in montana were
wet (and therefore productive) years, but the fundamental
economics of farming and ranching haven't changed that much.
an extensive tramway? in a town of what must have been about
10,000 people at the time? i hadn't heard of this before, although
i have some hazy recollection of a tram that may have run along the
gulch for a short distance. or maybe to the capitol.
as far as panning for gold goes, there is nearly always residual
gold that remains after the rich strikes are worked out that can
be panned, so this is not impossible. there are a few people
still eking out a living panning gold in the sierras, for example.
>
>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.
this seems likely to me, also. to get more than a flake
or two requires more work than hubbard seems to have
ever performed.
>
>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.
while i generally agree with you, i think you discount a bit much
the strength of the wild west mythos in the life of montanans of
the time. while helena at the time would have had the victorian
brick houses of the moderately well off and elite classes, it would
also have had many rough-hewn clapboard houses and miner's shacks.
it would have served as a trading center for the many rough and rowdy
miners and ranchers in the area around. it would have had
(still has) cowboy bars and places of ill-repute. a lot of the
people coming in and out would be real cowboys and indians.
the major civilizing influence was probably it being the capitol
of montana, and trying to put on a good face for it.
[clip]
-- see...@ix.netcom.com (Conner)
Note: remove 'spamblock' from address to reply
Friends of Dennis Erlich Club (www.netcom.com/~seekon/friends.html)
Chris Owen
Chuck Ferree wrote:
> Allan Matthews wrote:
>
> No, the spammer used his name to post
> nothing.
>
> In any event, Churchhill was no war
> criminal. He was one of the best leaders
> England ever had, and maybe ever will
> have. If it weren't for Churchill, the
> British people would be speaking German at
> this very moment!
>
> Chuck Ferree
> Bigots are worse than commie pinko SOBs
=======================================
Phillips
Churchill, good and bad.
He was a master of both the written and the spoken word. If I wanted a
leaader to inspire and ignite a nation in time of danger I would
certainly choose him.
Were his motives the purest? Hard to say. His situation in the 1930s was
that his politiical career had been pretty much finished by two events:
(a) The Dardanelles Disaster of World War I. Churchill was viewed
(probably unjustly) of having been the principal architect.
(b) The return to the Gold Standard in 1925 when he was Chanceller of
the Exchequer. this was an unmitigated disaster not, perhaps, because of
the return per se, but because the rate of exchange for the pound had
been set way too high ($4.86). The result was to price England's coal
out of world markets and so virtually destroy that export trade. The
general strike of 1926 was also seen as a result of it.
There was talk that, during the middle and late 30s he was financially
subsidized by a consortiium of Jews. Well, such people do not usualy
dole out the bucks without expecting something in return.
War undoubtedly had a certain attraction for him. The excitement, the
quickening of the blood, the renewed sense of unity and purpose.