On March 29, HBO aired the two-hour documentary “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,” a film by Alex Gibney based on Lawrence Wright’s book and 2011 New Yorker article.
Laying out many of the same details in the book and article, the film features ex-Church of Scientology members and officials revealing secrets of the organization and making claims of physical and psychological abuse.
It also delves into the life of the church’s controversial founder, L. Ron Hubbard, who was a prolific science fiction and fantasy author before he developed a self-help system called Dianetics in the early 1950s. The ideology of Dianetics evolved into a book by the same name and this became the foundation for Hubbard’s new religious movement of Scientology, which today includes high-profile celebrity members Tom Cruise and John Travolta.
Somewhat of a little known fact about Hubbard is that before creating this new movement, he was a boy growing up in Western Montana.
Born in Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard spent his formative years in Kalispell and Helena. His family moved to Kalispell in 1912 after Hubbard’s father, Harry Ross Hubbard, got a job at a local newspaper. They reportedly lived in a home near the fairgrounds, and Hubbard spent his infant days playing in the backyard.
During this period, according to accounts from the Church of Scientology, young Ron encountered a Blackfeet Indian tribe holding a ceremony on the outskirts of Kalispell and the young child danced and impressed the tribal elders. This incident formed the early bonds between Hubbard and the tribe, according to Hubbard. Later, when Hubbard was 6, he was honored with the status of “blood brother” by the Blackfeet, a rare honor for a white man. This has been disputed by several sources that have failed to find any evidence of this encounter. The Bureau of Indian Affairs penned a letter in 1979, which was cited by the Los Angeles Times during its expose on Hubbard and Scientology. The letter, written by the Superintendent of the BIA in Browning, states that the office did not have any record of Hubbard’s “adoption” as a blood brother.
According to Hubbard, he made friends with a tribal medicine man known as Old Tom. According to the church, these early experiences had profound influences on Hubbard and inspired his initial spiritual journey and eventual development of “Dianetics.”
Hubbard spoke about this time in Montana later in his pseudo autobiography:
I lived in the typical West with its do-and-dare attitudes, its wry humor, cowboy pranks and make nothing of the worst and most dangerous. My grandfather raised blooded horses and owned several famous studs. The weather of Montana is of course brutal. The country is immense and swallows men up rather easily hence they have to live bigger than life to survive. There were still Indians around living in forlorn and isolated tepees, the defeated race, making beautifully threaded buckskin gauntlets and other foofaraw. Notable amongst them was an Indian called “Old Tom” who was sufficiently dirty and outlaw and interesting, a full-fledged Blackfoot medicine man, to be a small boy’s dream.
After less than one year in Kalispell, the Hubbards uprooted once again and moved to Helena.
Young Ron spent several years in Helena, attending kindergarten and growing up in true Old West fashion. He learned to ride horses and break broncos, according to the church. He also joined the Boy Scouts and spent considerable time at the movie theater where his father worked, sparking Hubbard’s lifelong fascination with movies and movie stars.
Hubbard’s father eventually re-enlisted with the U.S. Navy as World War I began, and Hubbard spent the next few years living with his mother and aunts while his father served overseas. Hoping to be closer to her husband when he was on leave, Hubbard’s mother moved to San Diego with young Ron in 1921. After a year in San Diego, they moved again to Seattle.
By 1924, Hubbard had achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, building on the skills he first learned in Montana. As a teenager and young man, he would return to Helena several times over the next few years to visit family and revisit a place where he had fond memories growing up, illustrating the lasting connection between him and this corner of the state.