STATE OF FLORIDA
CITY OF CLEARWATER
PINELLAS COUNTY

CITY OF CLEARWATER COMMISSION HEARING RE:
THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY

Clearwater City Hall
Clearwater, Florida
Thursday, May 6, 1982

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City of Clearwater City Commission:
Charles LeCher, Mayor
Thomas Bustin, City Attorney
Anthony L , Shoemaker, City Manager
Rita Garvey, City Commissioner'
Paul Hatchett, Vice Mayor
James Calderbank, City Commissioner
James Berfield, City Commissioner
Lucille Williams, City Clerk
Consultants:

Michael J. Flynn, Esquire
12 Union Wharf
Boston, Massachusetts 02109

Thomas Greene, Esquire
12 Union Wharf
Boston, Massachusetts 02109

Thomas Hoffman, Esquire
12 Union Wharf
Boston, Massachusetts 02109

Kevin Flynn
12 Union Wharf
Boston, Massachusetts 02109



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I N D E X
2 Witness Page
3 Ronald DeWolfe .....................................5
4 Lori Taverna ........................................109
5 Casey Kelley .......................................230
6
7 E X H I B I T S
8 Number Description Page
9 20 Transcript from George Washington University, re L. Ron Hubbard 93
10 21 Biographical outline from the U.S. 94
11 Navy, re L. Ron Hubbard
12 22 ALGOL Ship Log 95

13 23 Letter, dated October 16, 1947, from 98
L. Ron Hubbard to the Veteran's
14 Administration

15 24 Biographical outline from Dianetics: 101
The. Original Thesis, re L. Ron Hubbard
16 25 'Biographical outline, re L. Ron 106
17 Hubbard
18 26 Biographical outline, re L. Ron 106
Hubbard
19 27 Cover of the book, All About Radia- 106
20 tion
21 28 Book,'All About Radiation 230
22 29 Book, Dianetics: The Modern Science 230
of Mental Health
23
24

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Clearwater, Florida
May 6, 1982
2 Morning Session
3
4 MR. LeCHER: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
5 Participants and interested bystanders, please take
6 your seats.
7 Good morning, again, and welcome back to the
8 Clearwater City Commission Public Hearings. This is
9 our second day, and I'd like to start again with the
10 Pledge to the f lag, led by Sid Klein-, our Police Chief.
11 And, also, the invocation will be given by our own
12 vice Mayor, Paul Hatchett.
13 So, please rise.
14 (Whereupon, the Pledge of Allegiance
was recited.)
16 MR. HATCHETT: our Father, I ask for you by name
17 on all of the earth, and we pray for Thine divine
18 guidance during our times of real sincerity. Give us
19 courage, give us strength and the ability to be
20 reasonable, courageous, and honest. We ask that in Thy
21 name. Amen.
22 MR. LeCHER: Thank you.
23 Thank you, Mr. Hatchett. That's really very
24 appropriate.


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I To those of you that are new to this, we have been
2 through one day of hearing. We are now in our second
3 day. And, of course, the Scientologists will have an
4 equal time when our time is through. And we would hope
5 that they would participate so that we can get an honest
6 opinion about the business at hand with respect to
7 Scientology.
8 Yesterday, we were talking to Mr. Ron DeWolfe, who
9 is the natural son of L. Ron Hubbard, who had a surname
10 of Hubbard at one time.

11

12 RONALD DeWOLFE, a witness herein,
13 having been previously sworn by a Clerk for the City of
14 Clearwater, was examined and testified as follows:
is MR. LeCHER: Arid Mr. DeWolfe, you do understand
16 that you were previously sworn in?
17 MR. DeWOLFE: Yes, I do.
18 MR. LeCHER: And anything you say is under the
19 threat of perjury.
20 Mr. Flynn, do you understand that he does not have
21 to be sworn in again; is that correct?
22 Mi. FLYNN: That's correct, sir.
23 MR. LeCHER: All right.
24 Yesterday, Mr. DeWolfe, we were talking primarily

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I about the history of the organization, how you fit into
2 it, and we kind of left off yesterday -- we were about
3 to get into Dianetics and E-Meters. You could start
4 there or you could backtrack and start wherever you'd
5 like. I'm suggesting to you Dianetics and the E-Meter
6 as a starting point, but it's up to you, sir.
7 MR. DeWOLFE: The E-Meter would be fine.
8 The E-Meter was invented by a Paul B. Mathieson
9 in 1951. He was a chiropractor in Los Angeles. And he
10 had been using it on his own and selling it on his own,
11 and then brought it to my father. And for a short time
12 through '51 and '52, he used his E-Meter but he would
13 not let -- he would not let my father manufacture it.
14 My father also demanded royalties and a piece of the
is action concerning its manufacture and sale.
16 So, then, through the '51 and '52 era and even possibly
17 even into '53, we were having to purchase the E-Meter
18 through Bob Mathieson. But what happened here, it was
19 used in early Dianetic auditing, but when Bob would not
20 turn the rights to the E-Meter over to my father or give
21 him a royalty, my father quit using it. And there was a
22 time period in there in which he totally invented and
23 created various Scientology processes which did not
24 require the E-Meter.







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1 Then, later, we were with a Don Green in Washington,
2 D.C., I think in 1954 or 155 a Don Green and Joe
3 Wallace put together our own E-Meter and, all of a
4 sudden, Scientology could now use E-Meters again..And
5 we had -- he invented other processes that could be used with
6 the E-Meter. It was a flow and ebb thing.
7 I think I want to make this point very clear:
8 that the -- as long as my father had some control over
9 the E-Meter in the beginning, then, it was used in
10 Dianetics and Sciento'logy. When he got into a war with
11 Bob over money and we couldn't shake the E-Meter out of
12 Bob's hands, then, we quit using the E-Meter. And then
13 when they invented -- when Joe Wallace and Don Green
14 in the mid-fifties in Washington, D.C. he then manu-
15 factured -- had those two guys manufacture the E-Meter
16 in the basement of our headquarters at that time which
17 was 1812 19th Street, Northwest. And then it became
18 popular. It depended upon his control of it, of the
19 instrument.
20 MR. LeCHER: Did Mr. Wallace improve upon the
21 E-Meter, redesign it
22 MR. DeWOLFE: Joe Wallace and Don Green made it
23 solid state. Before that, the E-Meter was a tube affair,
24 a lot of tubes, and it was a fairly good size. It was







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I about the size of - I don't mean this as a joke - it
2 was about the size of a breadbox. And then it also got
3 to be a very big projection job, and it became more and
4 more complicated. There were E-Meters with double dials,
5 with four dials, with enough switches and dials on it to
6 confuse you for a week. But -- and it got to the point,
7 there were a few of them that were two feet by a foot
8 by, say, eighteen inches tall and weighing about ten or
9 fifteen pounds, which was kind of hard to lug around from
10 one session to another, from an auditing session to
11 another.
12 MR. LeCHER: Is the E-Meter a deeply religious
13 symbol? If it is, I don't want to go into it any further.
14 or is it used for other reasons? Like, a crucifix may --
is MR. DeWOLFE: Well, I'm testifying to the early
16 days where ---prior to, I believe, a court decision
17 where this now becomes a religious artifact. But in
18 those days it was not. So, I leave that to your decision
19 as far as whether to continue with it.
20 But it was -- an E-Meter was basically a skin
21 galvanometer, a lie detector, and it would be technically
22 called a balanced wheatstone ridge, which is a very
23 simple basic electronic circuit.
24 And one of the main things that I used to remember







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1 about the E-Meter was that our favorite electrodes,
2 which we put onto Campbell soup cans - and Campbell
3 Soup probably made a great deal of money from us -- but
4 there was a small, very small -- in those days anyway,
5 particularly, the ones that plugged into the wall; today
6 they're battery-powered, and when it was designed and
7 built in the mid-fifties it was battery-powered. But
8 the ones that plugged into the wall had a tendency to,
9 because of the amount of very microscopic electrical flow
10 through it, electroplate your hands. That is, that the
11 -tin covering or the metal covering of the Campbell soup
12 cans would come off on your hands and so your hands
13 smelled pretty wierd most of the time.
14 But it was used in the beginning to.., as I said,
15 a crude lie detector. And when I say "crude," that's
16 a relative statement compared to the, for instance, the
17 present day polygraph that measures heartbeat, respira-
18 tion, et cetera, et cetera, you know, several different
19 patterns.
20 So, anyhow, that kind of covers the E-Meter. As
21 1 said, the point I wanted to make about the E-Meter
22 here is that it ran hot and cold with Dad, depending
23 upon his control of it. And he would say, like, "Well,
24 we don't need the E-Meter anymore because we have these







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1 new great, wonderful processes and techniques which don't
2 require the E-Meter." He said that because he couldn't
3 use the E-Meter because Bob Mathieson wouldn't cough
4 it up.
5 Let me back up to a couple of other areas here,
6 if you don't mind. I finished off where I had -- was
7 discussing --
8 MR. LeCHER: Go at your own pace, sir.
9 MR. DeWOLFE: Huh?
10 MR. LeCHER: Go at your own pace and back up if
11 you want to.
12 MR. DeWOLFE: I'm sorry, I didn't hear you, sir.
13 MR. LeCHER: I said just go talk at your own pace
14 and back up whenever you feel like it.
is MR. DeWOLFE: Well, I was talking about in the
16 beginning where you had I think I was referring to the
17 question about franchises, ten percent, and successful
18 organizations.
19 MR.' LeCHER: Yes, sir.
20 MR. DeWOLFE: Very quickly, to recap: There was
21 the original Dianetic Research Foundation, Elizabeth,
22 New Jersey, and that folded because of AMA pressure.
23 And then there was the foundation in Wichita, Kansas,
24 and that folded because of AMA pressure and, also, because







2-11

1 of my father's taking off with all the money and fleeing
2 in early 1952. So, getting together of organizations
3 was rather difficult. But there were other people.
4 As an example, when they set up -- as good business-
5 men, they set up very successful organizations, and I
6 had mentioned a couple yesterday. And one that crossed
7 my mind was in Phoenix, Arizona. There's two more that
8 are pretty important because they formed the basis today
9 of - and throughout the years - the various corporations
10 and organizations.
11 In 1954, there was a J. Edward Farber, who had
12 worked very hard and long in setting up the very first
13 Church of Scientology in California. Looking at this
14 you have to- look at this slightly in retrospect and
is within the context of the time of 1954, it wasn't all.
16 that easy to set up a very solid bullet-proof church
17 corporation in which you could do anything within the
18 corporate structure. So, the' Chamber of Commerce had
19 this in California. And here, again, it also demon-
20 strates the front organization thrust of my father's,
21 that is, many organizations which are very confusing
22 and -- by the way, to me, Scientology is Scientology.
23 I've always understood it that way. It doesn't make
24 any difference to me about what the corporation says or







2-12

1 where the corporation is; it is a corporate-type of
2 entity. To me, Scientology is Scientology, whether it's
3 in Los Angeles or Clearwater or London or Quebec, Canada.
4 It makes no difference; it's Scientology. And Scien-
5 tology is L. Ron Hubbard.
6 And there's many, many times, hundreds of times,
7 he would get into terrible rages about "This is mine;
8 this is mine. I run it, I own it, and I created it.
9 And nobody is going to make any money out of it except
10 me." And that is a synthesis of a theme which was
11 pushed at me hundreds of times and anybody at the
12 planning sessions.
13 So, anyway, J. Edward Farber had this tremendously
14 wonderful corporation in California which he was very
is proud of. And so, we whiplashed J. Edward Farber
16 around and took the corporation over. He resigned and
17 turned over the corporation to us.
18 Now, one of the things, too, about corporations
19 is that I was one of the early signatories to the very
20 first Scientology corporations. In all ...in any Scien-
21 tology corporation, apparently
22 MR. SHOEMAKER: I'm sorry, I did that.
23 MR. DeWOLFE: -- apparently, quote, unquote, run
24 by Hubbard's my father always held signed, undated







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1 resignations. Immediately the very second you were
2 put on the Board of Directors, you signed at the same
3 time. I did it and a lot of other people did it. You
4 signed an undated resignation which, then, he kept in
5 his safe. So, if you didn't play by his rules, all he
6 had to do was put the date on it and that was it, you
7 were out.
8 MR. LeCHER: What was the reason that he started
9 Dianetics and went from Dianetics to a corporation for
10 a religion? How did you get in -- why did you leave
11 the Church of Scientology?
12 MR. DeWOLFE: Okay.
13 Well, you're going ahead a great many years and
14 things. The -- how did Dianetics
is MR. LeCHER: Yes. What was the reason for convert-
16 ing Dianetics to something else, to a religion?
17 MR. DeWOLFE: Well, first of all, he couldn't use
18 Dianetics anymore. He had sold the rights to Don G.
19 Purcell in Wichita, Kansas, and he couldn't use Dianetics.
20 He couldn't use the techniques, he couldn't -- he sold
21 the copyrights to the books. And he had 'fled out from
22 Wichita'with all of the monies of the Wichita foundation.
23 But he couldn't, as I said, use it.
24 By the way, Scientology - the word "Scientology"







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1 is not original to my father; my father told me. And it
2 is that it comes from the German "scientologie" - and if
3 you ask me how to spell that, I don't know in German.
4 The best way I can really explain it very quickly:
5 Very quickly, to bring you up to date, a little bit of
6 biographical data here, autobiographical and otherwise.
7 And when I was born - I think I mentioned it before I
8 was born at two pounds, two ounces and prematurely. My
9 father had rather severely beaten my mother, and that's
10 what caused that, while he was trying to get involved
11 with black magic rituals.
12 But throughout all of my early years, I had been
13 with him quite a bit off and on. And then, of course,
14 there was the major trauma of the divorce from my mother
15 and the bigamous marriage with Sarah. But in early
16 1952 -- in early 1952, 1 went from Burlington, Washington,
17 drove down, and started living with my father on a con-
18 tinuous basis.
19 my very first connection -- my very first connec-
20 tion wit h Dianetics or Scientology, of course, was when
21 my father mentioned about the book, Dianetics, and about
22 the article in Astounding Science Fiction and then, of
23 course, the book. In 1950, 1 was living in Burlington,
24 Washington and he arranged for my auditing, my very first







I auditing. 2-15
2 My very first auditing was rather strange, because
3 he had arranged it through the Seattle Dianetic group
4 for me to commute from Burlington over there. But he
5 told me that -- he told me two things: one was that I
6 had to be -- he wanted me audited, and I had to be
7 audited under an assumed name. He didn't want me to
8 disclose who I was. And then he also told the auditors
9 that he only wanted them to concentrate on my mother,
10 because he didn't want to -- he didn't want me to dis-
11 close anything about him. And I thought that was sort
12 of interesting.
13 1 kept that up for a couple of weeks. Then, I
14 got tired of not being able to tell anybody who I was.
15 And how can one be audited Dianetically or remember
16 incidents from the past when you had to completely edit
17 and delete anything concerning your father and concentrate
18 on your mother, and at the same time not disclose who
19 you were? It got to be and I wasn't very old at the
20 time, I was sixteen, but I knew enough then to figure out
21 that that was very confusing.
22 Then, I arrived in Phoenix, Arizona in early '52.
23 He had just arrived from Wichita with Mary Sue. And the
24 very first day -- the very first day I arrived, he wanted







2-16

1 me audited immediately. But I had been -driven all
2 night and I was eighteen years old. I knew nothing
3 about Scientology. All I had read was Dianetics*: The.
4 Modern Science of Mental Health, and it never really
5 interested me very much as a book when I was young.
6 So, after about a couple of weeks there, we got
7 involved -- he asked me to sit down on the couch, and I
8 was high on Benzedrine, Bennies. And we started doing,
9 quote, "research" on a book called History of Man. So,
10 we spent a couple, three days on that. Here's the
11 book here, The Scientology History of Man; here's a copy
12 of it. And all the incidents -- he did a few with Mary
13 Sue, but the majority of incidents in it were off the
14 top of my head, as I had upwards of twenty, thirty
is milligrams of Bennies in me.
16 MR. LeCHER: It's a very small book, The History
17 of Man.
18 MR. DeWOLFE: Yes.
19 MR. LeCHER: How many pages
20 MR. DeWOLFE: This is -- but the thing about this
21 interests -- the interesting thing about the book is is
22 that this is purported to be -- it is presented as these
23 are incidents which are common to all everybody's
24 past. This is the PR about-the book; this is the thrust







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of the book that these are early genetic incidents in
2 the ancient primoral past of each and every man, woman,
3 and child on earth. And it came out of my drug trip.
4 And the -- I don't know how many thousands of
5 people have been audited on those particular incidents,
6 like, return to the clam. That is where, genetically,
7 you were a clam and you're having jaw trouble, and that
8 was one of the bases of -- according to Scientology and
9 my father, that's one of the bases of bad teeth, bad
10 having trouble with your jaws, because you were having
11 an engram as a clam fifty trillion years ago. But
12 MR. LeCHER: That may be considered to be religious.
13 And judged primarily on its face, we really don't want
14 to pursue that.
is I'd like to ask you one more -- let's get back to
16 the E-Meter.
17 MR. DeWOLFE: One quick thing, sir, I wanted to
18 mention was that the areas I'm talking about in the
19 fifties, it was not a religion then. We're talking
20 about -- that didn't come in as a corporation until
21 December 1953. Up through -- 1950 through '53, it was
22 a science, so that's what I'm referring to here and
23 I'm not getting into the area of beliefs in any way, as
24 far as I personally am concerned.







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1 MR. LeCHER: I realize that's a very fine line
2 for us, too.
3 MRS. GARVEY: The book was written in '52.
4 MR. LeCHER: Then, the book was written - thank
5 you, Mrs. Garvey - in 152.
6 Now, back to the E-Meter: Did the U.S. National
7 Bureau of Standards describe the E-Meter as worthless as
8 a diagnostic service?
9 MR. DeWOLFE: Yes. The FDA was concerned with the
10 E-Meter because it was being used as a diagnostic tool,
11 which, in fact, was true, I mean, the actual practice.
12 1 MR. LeCHER: The people that normally take these
13 courses, are they the average run-of-the-mill person
14 that you see in the street, or are they there because
is they're looking for help? I've read where the auditing
16 can cure arthritis and leukemia. I've also read where
17 your father cured an eighteen-month old girl a child,
18 1 believe it was a girl - of leukemia.
19 MR. DeWOLFE: That's not true.
20 MR. LeCHER: Is it possible, do you think, that
21 your father has those powers?
22 MR. DeWOLFE: I'm sorry, what was that?
23 MR. LeCHER: Do you think your father has those
24 powers or is that a hoax?


2-19
1 MR. DeWOLFE: No,- but those are claims. And
2 MR. LeCHER: Tell me about those claims.
3 MR. DeWOLFE: Well, first of all, leukemia is
4 cancer and, according to my father, all cancer stems
5 from the center of man. The center of man in Scientology
6 is sex. His logic is logic was at the time that he was
7 talking about leukemia and cancer -- was that cancer is
8 cells which are dividing, and dividing cells is a sexual
9 thing and -- as in prenatal activity, the conception.
10 And so, therefore, the basis the basis of all cancer
11 is sex.
12 If you had any big bad problems with sex in the
13 early childhood or something like that, then, this is
14 what's causing your cancer. And

MR. LeCHER: What about being a celibate?

16 MR. DeWOLFE: Mm?

17 MR. LeCHER: If you're a celibate, would that
18 eliminate your possibility of having cancer?
19 MR. DeWOLFE: Well, that probably will cause can-
20 cer because of your lack of sexual activity.
21 MR. LeCHER: I guess there's no way you can win.
22 RDeWOLFE: Correct.
23 And then, of course -- then, you know, compulsive
24 sex or too much sex or something like that, that could







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1 cause cancer, too.
2 MR. LeCHER: Was your father preoccupied with sex?
3 MR. DeWOLFE: Very much so, yes.
4 Anyway, getting back to your question on leukemia,
5 he has -- he had written many things about the ability of
6 Dianetics and Scientology to cure cancer and, also,
7 has reportedly, in those days -- of auditing an eighteen-
8 year old baby -- eighteen-month old baby successfully
9 with cancer.
10 And in my experience throughout Scientology, I
11 have never seen any cure or remission or halting of
12 cancer, period. And he had -- if you wait a second, I
13 think I have -- this comes from - I don't want to get
14 all involved in the whole thing - but this come's from
15 a -- The Journal of Hubbard's Association of Scientolo-
16 gists' International. You see, that was a, quote,
17 "scientific organization," and quote, "not a religious
18 organization." It was copyrighted in 1953, and quote:
19 "Leukemia is evidently psychosomatic in origin, and
20 at least eight cases of leukemia have been treated
21 successfully by a Dianetic Center medicine had tradition-
22 ally given up. The source of leukemia has been reported
23 to be an engram containing the phrase," quote, "'it turns
24 my blood to water,'" unquote.


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