Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

complained to the Navy Department, casting a shadow over Hubbard's record.[6] He had a long
spell of inactive duty at the beginning of 1921 while he was waiting for a new posting and he and
May spent a great deal of time discussing their future. Hub expected May to conform, like other Navy
wives, and trail around the country with him from posting to posting; when he was at sea, he
wanted her to be close to his ship's home port. May obviously wanted to be with Hub, but she was
reluctant to move Ron from school to school and loath to leave her family. She had perhaps
secretly hoped that Hub would tire of the Navy and return to civilian life in Helena, but the
depression wiped out whatever miserable opportunities he might have had of finding work and she
realized it would never happen. In September 1921, Hub was posted to the battleship USS
Oklahoma as an Assistant Supply Officer.
He anticipated serving on board for at least two years, much of that time at sea, and the
opportunities for visits home to Helena would be severely curtailed. As a loyal wife, May felt she
could no longer justify staying in Helena. She and Ron packed their bags, bade the family a tearful
farewell and caught a train for San Diego, the USS Oklahoma's home port.
Although Ron must have missed the convivial domesticity of 'the old brick', he did not appear to
mind, in the least, being a 'Navy brat' - the curiously affectionate label applied to all children of
servicemen, many of whom needed more than the fingers of both hands to count their schools. He
was a gregarious boy, quick to make friends, and starting a new school held no terrors for him.
After about a year in San Diego, the Hubbards moved north to Seattle, in Washington State, when
the Oklahoma was transferred to Puget Sound Navy Shipyard.
In Seattle Ron joined the boy scouts, an event that would figure prominently in a hand-written
journal which he scrawled on the pages of an old accounts book, interspersed with short stories, a
few years later: 'The year Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Three rallied round and found me
contentedly resting on my laurels, a first class badge. For I was a boy scout then and deaf was my
friend that hadn't heard all about it. I considered Seattle the best town on the map as far as
scouting was concerned.'
In October 1923, Lieutenant Hubbard completed sea duty on the USS Oklahoma and, after brief
spells of temporary duty in San Francisco and New York, was assigned for further training to the
Bureau of Supply and Accounts School of Application in Washington DC. The US Navy, which
clearly despised any form of land transport, saved itself the cost of two long-distance train fares by
giving May and Ron berths on the USS U.S. Grant, a German warship acquired by the US Navy after
the First World War, which was due to sail from Seattle to Hampton Roads, Virginia, via the
Panama Canal. It was thus December, and the snow was thick on the ground, before the
Hubbards were re-united in Washington after a voyage of some seven thousand miles, threequarters
of the way round the coast of the United States. It was on this trip, it seems, that Ron met
the enigmatic Commander 'Snake' Thompson of the US Navy Medical Corps, a psychoanalyst he
would later claim was responsible for awakening his youthful interest in Freud, although he only
made the briefest mention of the journey in his journal. His style of writing was fluent, breezy,
schoolboyishly cocksure and addressed directly to the reader. 'If obviously pushed upon,' he wrote,
'I supposed I could write a couple of thousands [sic] words on that trip . . . But I spare you.'
He usually referred to himself in a gently ironic tone, perhaps to avoid giving an impression of
thinking rather too highly of himself. When he arrived in Washington, two troops of local scouts
were battling for a prized scouting trophy, the Washington Post Cup. Troop 100, he noted, belonged
to the YMCA 'and would therefore probably lose', so he joined the other outfit, Troop 10, 'which must
have sighed loudly when it perceived me crossing the threshold'.