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Rex Fraser mounted the knoll and setting his hat more securely against the wind squinted at the huddle of unpainted
shacks below him.
“So this,” he said to his horse, “is Montana City.”
Hubbard entered the School of Engineering at George Washington University in the
fall of 1930. He was a poor student—failing German and calculus—but he excelled in
extracurricular activities. He began writing for the school newspaper. A new literary
magazine at GWU provided a venue for his rst published works of ction. He became
director of the gliding club, a thrilling new pastime that was just catching on (Hubbard’s
gliding license was #385). The actual study of engineering was a secondary pursuit, as
his failing grades reflected.
In September 1931, Hubbard and his friend Philip “Flip” Browning took a few weeks
o to barnstorm through the Midwest in an Arrow Sport biplane. “We carefully
wrapped our ‘baggage,’ threw the re extinguisher out to save half a horsepower,
patched a hole in the upper wing, and started o to skim over four or ve states with
the wind as our only compass,” Hubbard writes. By now, he had taken to calling himself
“Flash.”
Hubbard’s account of this adventure, “Tailwind Willies,” was his rst commercially
published story, appearing in The Sportsman Pilot in January 1932. It was the launch of
an unprecedented career. (He would go on to publish more books than any other author,
according to the 2006 Guinness World Records, with 1,084 titles.)
In the spring of 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Hubbard undertook a
venture that displayed many of the hallmarks of his future exploits. He posted a notice
on several university campuses: “Restless young men with wanderlust wanted for the
Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. Cost to applicant $250 payable at the dock in
Baltimore before sailing. Must be healthy, dependable, resourceful, imaginative, and
adventurous. No tea-hounds or tourist material need apply.” The goals of the expedition
were grand and various—primarily, to make newsreels for Fox Movietone and Pathé
News, while exploring the pirate haunts of the Caribbean and voodoo rites in Haiti.
There were also vague plans to “collect whatever one collects for exhibits in museums.”
“It’s dicult at any age to recognize a messiah in the making,” wrote one of the
young men, James S. Free, a journalist who signed on to the expedition. He was twentythree
years old, two years older than Hubbard. They were going to be partners in the
adventure, along with Hubbard’s old ying buddy, Phil Browning. “I cannot claim
prescient awareness that my soon-to-be business partner possessed the ego and talents
that would later develop his own private religion,” Free wrote in a notebook he titled
“Preview of a Messiah.”
Hubbard was living with his parents in Washington, DC, when Free arrived. “Ron
introduced me to his mother, whose long light brown hair seemed dark beside the
reddish glow of her son’s hair and face,” Free wrote, in one of the few records of the
actual relationship between Hubbard and his mother. “I recall little else about her
except that like her husband, Navy lieutenant Henry Ross Hubbard, she plainly adored
young Ron and considered him a budding genius.”