Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Chapter 4
Blood and Thunder
'His first action on leaving college was to blow off steam by leading an expedition into Central
America. In the next few years he headed three, all of them undertaken to study savage peoples
and cultures to provide fodder for his articles and stories. Between 1933 and 1941 he visited many
barbaric cultures and yet found time to write seven million words of published fact and fiction.'
(A Brief Biography of L. Ron Hubbard, 1959)
Precious little care went into compiling the many biographies of L. Ron Hubbard. Had anyone
bothered to research Hubbard's published output, it would immediately have been obvious that he
had not written anything like seven million words during this period. Between 1933 and 1941, he
published about 160 articles and stories, almost all of them in pulp magazines. The nature of the
medium proscribed lengthy literary efforts, thus pulp fiction tended to be short, with few stories
running to more than 10,000 words. If he had written seven million published words, the average
length of each of his contributions would have been an impossible 44,000 words.
A little intelligent inquiry would also have established that Hubbard never left North America during
the years in question: the 'fodder' for his stories derived not from expeditions to faraway places, but
from past experiences embellished by his fecund imagination. Neither did he visit 'barbaric
cultures', except, perhaps, those to be found in New York and Los Angeles . . .
• • • • •
Ron arrived back in Washington DC in February 1933, not too disappointed at his failure as a gold
prospector and hotly anxious to renew his acquaintanceship with a young lady he had met on a
gliding field shortly before his father sent him packing to Puerto Rico.
The object of his ardour was a twenty-six-year-old farmer's daughter from Elkton, Maryland. Her
name was Margaret Louise Grubb, but everyone called her Polly. She was a bright, pretty girl with
bobbed blond hair and an independent streak in keeping with the age of Amelia Earhart who, nine
months earlier, had become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Earhart inspired
thousands of American women to take an interest in aviation and at weekends Polly used to like to
walk out to an airfield near her home to watch the gliders wobble uncertainly into the air behind a
tow from an aged and rusting Ford.
An only child whose mother had died years earlier, she both looked after her father and supported
herself financially (she had got her first job, working in a shoe shop, at the age of sixteen). But
despite her responsibilities, she was soon determined to learn to fly and was well on the way to
getting her own licence[1] when a young man with startling red hair showed up at the airfield one
weekend.
Polly could hardly fail to register Ron's arrival since he was immediately the focus of attention
among the little group of leather-helmeted pilots waiting for a tow. They seemed to gather naturally
around him, laughing frequently while he talked non-stop, slicing the air with his hands to illustrate
his various aerial exploits. For his part, it was not long before Ron noticed the attractive young
woman in flying gear and strolled over to talk to her.