Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Chapter 1
A Dubious Prodigy
According to the colourful yarn spun for the benefit of his followers, L. Ron Hubbard was
descended on his mother's side from a French nobleman, one Count de Loupe, who took part in
the Norman invasion of England in 1066; on his father's side, the Hubbards were English settlers
who had arrived in America in the nineteenth century. It was altogether a distinguished naval family:
both his maternal great-grandfather, 'Captain' I. C. DeWolfe, and his grandfather, 'Captain' Lafayette
Waterbury, 'helped make American naval history',[1] while his father was 'Commander' Harry Ross
Hubbard, US Navy.
As his father was away at sea for lengthy periods, the story goes, little Ron grew up on his wealthy
grandfather's enormous cattle ranch in Montana, said to cover a quarter of the state [approximately
35,000 square miles!]. His picturesque friends were frontiersmen, cowboys and an Indian
medicine man. 'L. Ron Hubbard found the life of a young rancher very enjoyable. Long days were
spent riding, breaking broncos, hunting coyote and taking his first steps as an explorer. For it was
in Montana that he had his first encounter with another culture the Blackfoot [Pikuni] Indians. He
became a blood brother of the Pikuni and was later to write about them in his first published novel,
Buckskin Brigades. When he was ten years old, in 1921, he rejoined his family. His father, alarmed
at his apparent lack of formal learning, immediately put him under intense instruction to make up
for the time he had "lost" in the wilds of Montana. So it was that by the time he was twelve years old,
L. Ron Hubbard had already read a goodly number of the world's greatest classics - and his
interest in religion and philosophy was born.'[2]
• • • • •
Virtually none of this is true. The real story of L. Ron Hubbard's early life is considerably more
prosaic and begins not on a cattle ranch but in a succession of rented apartments necessarily
modest since his father was a struggling white-collar clerk drifting from job to job. His grandfather
was neither a distinguished sea captain nor a wealthy rancher but a small-time veterinarian who
supplemented his income renting out horses and buggies from a livery barn. It is true, however,
that his name was Lafayette O. Waterbury.
As far as anyone knew, the Waterburys came from the Catskills, the dark-forested mountain range
in New York State celebrated in the early nineteenth century as the setting for Washington Irving's
popular short story about Rip Van Winkle - a character only marginally more fantastic than the
Waterburys' most famous scion.
Shortly before the turmoil of the Civil War divided the nation, Abram Waterbury and his young wife,
Margaret, left the Catskills to join the thousands of hopeful settlers trekking west in covered
wagons to seek a better future. By 1863 he had set up in business as a veterinarian in Grand
Rapids, Michigan and on 25 July 1864, Margaret gave birth to a son whom they named Lafayette,
perhaps after the town in Indiana at which they had stopped on their journey before turning north to
Grand Rapids.
Lafayette, undoubtedly thankful to be known to his friends as Lafe, learned the veterinary trade from
his father and married before he was twenty. His bride was twenty-one-year-old Ida Corinne
DeWolfe, from Hampshire, Illinois.