Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

A few years later Ron would provide, in his usual jaunty prose, a picturesque description of how he
had become disillusioned with civil engineering: 'I have some very poor grade sheets which show
that I studied to be a civil engineer in college. Civil engineering seemed very handsome at the time.
I met the lads in their Stetsons from Crabtown to Timbuctu and they seemed to lead a very colorful
existence squinting into their transits. However, too late, I was sent up to Maine by the Geological
Society to find the lost Canadian Border. Much bitten by seven kinds of insects, gummed by the
muck of swamps, fed on johnny cake and tarheel, I saw instantly that a civil engineer had to stay far
too long in far too few places and so I rapidly forgot my calculus and slip stick . . .'[10]
At the end of the next semester, Ron's grades showed no improvement and he remained on
probation. He was nevertheless elected a member of Phi Theta XI, the Professional Engineering
Fraternity, and was photographed for the year book in formal evening dress, black tie and starched
wing collar, as if grimly intent, like his fraternity fellows, on pursuing a career building bridges. On
the evening of 8 January 1932, Ron could be found among the eight hundred revellers at the first
Engineering Ball, held in the west ballroom at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. Music for
dancing was provided by Red Anderson and his orchestra - 'Mood Indigo', 'Goodnight Sweetheart',
'Minnie the Moocher' and 'When the Moon comes over the Mountain' were the popular songs of the
day - and the cabaret featured The Troubadours, under the directions of one Trimble Sawtelle. The
Hatchet listed Ron as one of the members of the organizing committee and declared the event to
be a 'pronounced' success.
A more important event for Ron that month was the publication of his first article in a magazine.
'Tailwind Willies', in the Sportsman Pilot, described his adventures flying across country in the
Midwest with his friend Philip 'Flip' Browning. 'We had three weeks' excess time before we had to
get back to the college grind,' he wrote. 'Our resources were one Arrow Sport biplane, two
toothbrushes and four itchy feet . . . We carefully wrapped our "baggage", threw the fire extinguisher
out to save half a horsepower, patched a hole in the upper wing and started off to skim over four or
five states with the wind as our only compass . . .'
The forced landing at Gratis was not apparently considered worthy of mention, perhaps because
there appeared to be no shortage of spectacular, not to say unlikely, incidents. At Newport, Indiana,
for example, they stopped to take on gas but got stuck in a muddy field. 'I crawled out to let Flip take
a whirl at it alone. By using up half the field he managed to wish the muddy Sparrow into her
element, and after building some altitude, wheeled over to the place where I stood and called down
that there was another field a short distance away. After pacifying a sheriff, who was about to lock
me up for trespassing, by shoving him into a mud puddle, I hopped onto the running board of a
Purdue Boy's car and burned road over to Flip's new landing place - if you could call it that. The
second field was little better than the first and three attempts were necessary before we willed the
Sparrow up just in time to see a nine-foot telephone wire at the height of our prop. Flip threw the
nose down and the wires were a scant foot above my head . . .'
Any hope of Ron knuckling down to his studies disappeared early in 1932 when the Hatchet
announced its intention to publish a monthly Literary Review. Nothing could have suited him better,
for it provided him with a further excuse to neglect his tedious engineering books while he wrote
more short stories, and sifted through the hundreds he had already written, to find something
suitable for publication.
It was unthinkable, out of the question as far as Ron was concerned, for the Literary Review to
appear without a contribution from L. Ron Hubbard and the first issue, published on 9 February
1932, carried a short story eponymously titled 'Tah', about a twelve-year-old boy soldier in China on
a route march to a gory death at the point of a bayonet. It was clearly a successful debut, for the