BALLADEER

On his return to the United States in 1929, and while launching his literary career as a student at George Washington University, L. Ron Hubbard made his first fully professional appearance as radio WOL’s balladeer. His instruments of choice — his own superbly fine baritone accompanied by a Hawaiian ukulele. Through the remainder of the 1930s, he continued performing on a casual basis, but clearly never lost his professional edge, as evidenced by his next radio slot.

To abbreviate a long and adventurous story: The summer of 1940 had found L. Ron Hubbard heading a nautical expedition from his Bremerton, Washington home north through the British Columbian passage to the Alaskan panhandle. The voyage, conducted on behalf of the United States Navy’s Hydrographic Office and aimed at charting treacherous inland waterways, had also taken LRH deep into native American habitats for ethnological research. Yet landing at the Alaskan port of Ketchikan, and owing to his renown as both author and mariner, he received another invitation to the airwaves.

The station was the Voice of Alaska, radio station KGBU, headed and hosted by local personality Jimmy Britton. The territory’s only chain broadcast facility, radio KGBU, catered to listeners all along the lower Alaskan coast and thus offered several shows for yachtsmen and fisherfolk. L. Ron Hubbard’s slot, entitled “The Mail Buoy,” was typical.

Again no recordings were made. Written transcripts, however, offer not only dialogue, but the lyrics of ballads he wrote and performed. Typical is his hauntingly beautiful “Wreck of the Alaskan Chief,” inspired by the loss of a cannery fleet vessel off the rocky Dover shore, and apparently performed with either ukulele or guitar.

For the next several years thereafter, Ron appears precisely as portrayed by acclaimed editor and colleague John W. Campbell Jr.: an immensely talented, if occasional musician, “as fully as good as Bing Crosby and Lawrence Tibbet -– with an effect sort of halfway between those two.” In an especially evocative note, Campbell describes an L. Ron Hubbard performance in these terms: “He has a low, magnificently mellow baritone voice, and he ‘puts over’ a song so powerfully, that when he’s finished, there’s a very sharply noticeable pause of dead silence before anyone speaks or shifts to make small noises in the semidark.” As a further note on repertoire, Campbell correctly spoke of songs Ron had picked up, “here, there and everywhere,” including a pre-war Asiatic Fleet’s “The Armored Cruiser Squadron,” and “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest,” which, as the editor explained, may have lost something through association with the film Treasure Island, but became altogether “spine-chilling and blood-curdling when Ron sings it by firelight.”

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