Once again, Hubbard stood on the treacherous precipice, where the prospect of heroic action awaited him—or else indignity, or a death that would be obscured by the deaths of tens of thousands of others. One month after the invasion of Okinawa, Hubbard was admitted to the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, complaining of stomach pains.
This is a key moment in the narrative of Dianetics and Scientology. “Blinded with injured optic nerves and lame with physical injuries to hip and back at the end of World War II, I faced an almost nonexistent future,” Hubbard writes of himself during this period. “I was abandoned by my family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple.” Hubbard says he healed himself of his traumatic injuries, using techniques that would become the foundation of Dianetics and Scientology. “I had no one to help me; what I had to know I had to find out,” he recalled. “And it’s quite a trick studying when you cannot see.”
Doctors at Oak Knoll were never sure exactly what was wrong with him, except for a recurrence of his ulcer. In records of Hubbard’s many physical examinations and X-rays, the doctors make no note of scars or evidence of wounds, nor do his military records show that he was ever injured during the war.
In the hospital, Hubbard says, he was also given a psychiatric examination. To his alarm, the doctor wrote two pages of notes. “And I was watching this, you know, saying, ‘Well, have I gone nuts, after all?’ ” He conspired to take a look at the records to see what the doctor had written. “I got to the end and it said, ‘In short, this officer has no neurotic or psychotic tendencies of any kind whatsoever.’ ” (There is no psychiatric evaluation contained in Hubbard’s medical records.)
POLLY AND THE TWO CHILDREN had spent the war waiting for Ron on their plot in Port Orchard, but there was no joyous homecoming. “My wife left me while I was in a hospital with ulcers,” Hubbard noted. “It was a terrible blow when she left me for I was ill and without prospects.”
Soon after leaving the hospital, Hubbard towed a house trailer behind an old Packard to Southern California, where so many ambitious and rootless members of his generation were seeking their destiny. There was a proliferation of exotic new religions in America and many other countries, caused by the tumult of war and disruptions of progress that older denominations weren’t prepared to solve. Southern California was filled with migrants who weren’t tied to old creeds and were ready to experiment with new ways of thinking. The region was swarming with Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Zoroastrians, and Vedantists. Swamis, mystics, and gurus of many different faiths pulled acolytes into their orbits.
The most brilliant member of this galaxy of occultists was John Whiteside Parsons, known as Jack, a rocket scientist working at what would later become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Technical Institute. (Parsons, who has a crater on the Moon named after him, developed solid rocket fuel.) Darkly handsome and brawny, later called by some scholars the “James Dean of the occult,” Parsons was a science-fiction fan and an outspoken advocate of free love. He acquired a three-story Craftsman-style mansion, with a twelve-car garage, at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena—a sedate, palm-lined street known as Millionaires Row. The house had once belonged to Arthur H. Fleming, a logging tycoon and philanthropist, who had hosted former president Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Albert Einstein in its oval dining room. The street had also been home to William Wrigley, of the chewing-gum fortune, and the beer baron Adolph Busch, whose widow still lived next door.