Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

ound the block and then come in the motel as if it had come from somewhere else.[3]
Hubbard seemed in good spirits in Daytona and his health was much improved. 'He was really
happy, was eating well and didn't curse so much,' said Dincalci. 'I guess it was the first time he'd
been able to put himself out and about. There were things to do and people to see. He went out
and bought some cars for the org - a couple of Matadors and a Chevy station wagon - and he
enjoyed doing that; he liked wheeling and dealing. He liked the fact that he could see the org from
where we were, but that no one knew we were there. Sometimes Sea Org people would take a
swim from the beach right in front of our hotel and that meant he wouldn't go out until late in the
evening. When he visited the org in his flash gold Cadillac, everyone would be out saluting him. He
always arrived from an inland direction and said he'd driven half a day to get there.'
Holidaymakers at Daytona Beach observed the comings and going at the Neptune motel without
much curiosity and the Scientologists were not around long enough to make their presence felt, for
in October a perfect location was found for a permanent land base, on the other side of the Florida
panhandle.
Clearwater was a quiet retirement resort, just north of St Petersburg, which liked to refer to itself as
'sparkling Clearwater'. It was a sobriquet derived more from its location, straddling a peninsula
between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, than from the nature of its social life: more than a third
of Clearwater's 100,000 residents were over the age of sixty-five and so there was a leisurely, faintly
antiquated, ambience about the place. Shuffleboard was the most popular afternoon recreation,
after snoozing in the shade of trees draped with Spanish moss, and it was still possible to enjoy
that rare delight, a real chocolate malt, at Brown Bros luncheonette.
Change was not a welcome phenomenon in a place like Clearwater, yet the town had suffered, to a
certain extent, from the urban blight that had afflicted so many American cities in the 'sixties and
'seventies. Downtown residents had moved out to the suburbs, stores migrated to the shopping
malls and tourists favoured the new hotels in the beach areas across the causeway. The centre of