Early Fifties

                Bud Eubanks called to meet for lunch this Friday.  We knew each other in the early fifties in California, when we were both at L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and Scientology.  I hadn’t seen Bud since then, until about four years ago when I discovered he lived a block away here in Kansas City.  Now Bud says he wants to try writing a play.  Knowing I teach literature, he wants me to bring him a “drama,” a play I would recommend.

                [On a bookshelf in the hallway of our apartment are 33 scripts of plays that Bev and I acted in the fifties and sixties, in Dayton and Kansas City, sometimes together, sometimes alone.  I pulled out “Biography.”  Bev and I met doing that play in an amateur theater in Dayton.   The cover said “Wilson,” my part in the play, set in the thirties.  We each had short glamorous roles (I think we were supposed to be actors), so we looked beautiful and handsome.  We spent much of the time during the play in the wings dancing to songs like “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “Life is just a bowl of cherries,” and one about meeting in the Five and Ten Cent Store.  We fell in love.  I can’t part with any of those scripts, so I will find Bud something else.]

                I had met Eubanks because I had already been in Dianetics since 1950, and I showed up in Phoenix when Hubbard (he was Ron to all of us) opened his Scientology school in Phoenix. When Hubbard’s book, Dianetics, was published in the spring of 1950, I was a sophomore at St. John’s College in Annapolis, with a part-time job in the college bookstore.  As a fan of Analog, the science-fiction magazine (I think it had a different name then), I read the first review of the book, by another science-fiction writer, A. E. VanVogt, and promptly ordered copies for the bookstore.  Somehow, I discovered the Hubbard was to be signing books at a bookstore in Washington D.C., so I collected a couple of classmates and drove over. 

                Hubbard had left the store, but we found out where he was staying and showed up to meet him.  When the semester ended in June, Hubbard invited the three of us to spend the summer in Elizabeth, New Jersey, with him and Dr. Winter, an MD associated with him at the time.  That summer I lived in Winter’s home, John Sanborn stayed at a mansion Ron had rented to start his Dianetics training school, and the third friend lived in Hubbard’s house.  The fact that my third friend was Hemingway’s youngest son probably had something to do with the invitation.

                We became graduates of Hubbard’s first auditor training class, and were invited to go to Los Angeles to be on the staff of the Dianetics Foundation that had been quickly organized by A. E. VanVogt.  I must write about those days in another post; now this aging man must get to bed (after watching Rachel Madow on MSNBC).

Comments

[Rachel]

Rachel Madow was on the Colbert report the other night - she's pretty funny.

You were friends with Hubbard AND Hemmingway's youngest son?! I can't wait to read more about those days!

[bree]

Okay your holding back on the stories Ted....Hubbard, Hemingway, and Anger. In my guestimation you have atleast a decades worth or more of storytelling. Plus, I know your classes aren't boring, because your get us all riled up in class. I want to know what happened with the students Obama story?