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Ron Jr. also recalls a hard-drinking, drug-abusing father who would mistreat his mother and other women, but who, when, under the influence, would delight in telling his son all of his exploits. Finally, Ron Jr. remembers his father as a "broke science-fiction writer" who espoused that the road to riches and glory lay in selling religion to the masses.
Nineteen fifty was a watershed year for the sixteen-year-old Ron Jr., when his father's book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was published. While in the 1980s self-help books hold little novelty, Dianetics was a pioneer of that genre. Happiness in 1950 could be a reality, if only one practiced the strange amalgam of science fiction and psychoanalysis offered in the senior Hubbard's best-seller. It was an unexpected success for Hubbard, then living in New Jersey, when the mailman would deliver daily sacks of letters from the unhappy and desperate who had read the book and wanted L. Ron Hubbard to take them to the promised land. It was a dream come true --a science-fiction writer who not only created a world of fantasy but packaged it and sold it as reality.
In 1950 L. Ron Hubbard opened a Dianetics clinic, where the hopeful and newly cenverted could come, for a fee, and their ills --from loneliness to cancer --would be cured. Danetics was the new Scientific Revolution. and L. Ron Hubbard was its prophet.
Scientology is essentially a self-help therapy. It is based on one premise that by recalling negative experiences or "engrams", a person can free himself from repressed feelings that cripple his life. This liberation process is assisted by a counselor called an "auditor" who charges up to hundreds of dollars a session. The auditor's basic aid is the "E-meter", a skin galvanometer that is said to help him ascertain the problems of his client.
Soon the New Jersey authorities and the American Medical Association challenged the veracity of the new faith. L. Ron Hubbard met the challenge by fleeing the state (not the last time this was to happen). A frequent memory of Ron Jr. is his father's packing up shoe boxes with thousands of dollars to move on to greener and safer pastures.
Coming into manhood in the early fifties, Ron Jr. learned the virtues of flimflam and keeping one step ahead of the law and creditors. But he admits that he accepted his father's teachings and example as correct. By the time his father started the modern Church of Scientology in Arizona and New Jersey in 1953, young Hubbard was not only a disciple but a willing organizer in the new movement. He was to be so throughout the 1950s.
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