Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

it be a Congressional hearing or just in the back of some hangar, you'll probably hear the name of
Ron Hubbard mentioned, accompanied by such adjectives as "crazy", "wild" and "dizzy". For the
flaming-haired pilot hit the city like a tornado a few years ago and made women scream and strong
men weep by his aerial antics. He just dared the ground to come up and hit him . . . Ron could do
more stunts in a sailplane than most pilots can in a pursuit job. He would come out of spins at an
altitude of thirty inches and thumb his nose at the undertakers who used to come out to the field
and titter.'
It was not too surprising that Ron was considered to be eminently suitable for inclusion in the
'Who's Who' column, for it was patently obvious that he had been at pains to project himself as the
most colourful of characters: 'Before he fell from grace and became an aviator, he was, at various
times, top Sergeant in the Marines, radio crooner, newspaper reporter, gold miner in the West
Indies and movie director-explorer . . .' Among his other achievements, it seems he taught himself
to fly powered aircraft ('He climbed into a fast ship and, without any dual time at all, gave the engine
the soup and hopped off . . .'), then became a barnstormer and 'flew under every telephone wire in
the Middle West', before settling down to become director of the flying club at George Washington
University. H. Latane Lewis II concluded that Ron was 'one of aviation's most distinguished
hellraisers'. It was a sobriquet with which the subject heartily concurred.
When Nibs was bawling and burping like other contented babies, the twenty-three-year-old
'distinguished hell-raiser' decided it was time to make the acquaintance of his fellow pulp writers.
Leaving Polly and the baby at home, he caught a train for New York and checked into a $1.50-anight
room at the Forty-fourth Street Hotel, which he had been assured was where many visiting
writers stayed.
In 1934, with the country still in the stranglehold of the Depression, there were few tourists in New
York, but even before the Wall Street Crash the Forty-fourth Street Hotel had rarely attracted much
tourist trade. It was a seedy establishment on Times Square largely patronized by out-of-work
actors, third-rate vaudeville performers, wrestlers, touts and bookies. Frank Gruber, the only pulp
writer resident when Ron arrived, accurately characterized his fellow guests as 'all-round no-goods
and deadbeats'.
Gruber was an aspiring writer from Mount Morris, Illinois, who had come to New York to make his
fortune on the strength of selling one story to Secret Agent X magazine and a couple more to
Underworld. That he was not succeeding soon became evident when he explained to Ron how to
get a free bowl of tomato soup at an Automat. All you had to do, he said, was pick up a bowl, fill it
with hot water, skip the nickel slot which dispensed soup powder and grab a couple of bags of
crackers. You took your bowl of hot water to a table, crumbled the crackers into it, then tipped in half
a bottle of tomato ketchup. 'Presto!' said Gruber triumphantly. 'Tomato soup.'
Not entirely motivated by charity, Ron offered to buy Gruber a meal. Sitting in Thompson's
Restaurant on Sixth Avenue, just around the corner from the hotel, Ron pumped the other man for
information about which editors were easiest to see, who was buying what kind of material and
which magazines paid most. He made a list of the commissioning editors at the most important
publishers - Street and Smith, the Frank A. Munsey Company, Popular Publications and Dell
Magazines.
A few days later, Gruber took Ron along to Rosoff's restaurant on 43rd Street, where members of
the American Fiction Guild met for lunch every Friday. Most of the successful pulp writers in New
York were members of the Guild and most of them gathered at Rosoff's at lunchtime on Fridays.
They were names familiar to millions of pulp readers: Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage; George