Son of naval commander Harry Ross Hubbard and Ledora May Hubbard, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on March 13, 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska. At the age of two, he and his family took up residence on a ranch outside Kalispell, Montana, and from there moved to the state’s capital, Helena.
Mastering each survival skill chronicled in his scout book, Ron at the age 13 became America’s youngest Eagle Scout.
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As a young boy he learned much about survival in the rugged Far West — with what he called “its do-and-dare attitudes, its wry humour, cowboy pranks, and make-nothing of the worst and most dangerous.” Riding horses at the age of three and a half, he soon faced such dangers, escaping a pack of coyotes astride his mare named Nancy Hanks.
L. Ron Hubbard’s mother was a rarity in her time. A thoroughly educated woman, who had attended teacher’s college prior to her marriage to Ron’s father, she was aptly suited to tutor her young son. Under her guidance, Ron was reading and writing at an early age, and soon feeding his insatiable curiosity about life with the works of Shakespeare, the Greek philosophers and other classics.
When his father’s naval career necessitated that the family leave Montana for a series of cross-country journeys, Ron’s mother was also on hand to help him make up what he missed in school.
It was also through these early years Ron first encountered another culture, that of the Blackfoot Indians, then still living in isolated settlements on the outskirts of Helena. His particular friend was an elderly medicine man, who was, as he wrote, an “outlaw and interesting, a full-fledged Blackfoot Medicine Man... a small boy’s dream.”
Establishing a unique friendship with the normally taciturn Indian, Ron was soon initiated into the various secrets of the tribe, their legends, customs and methods of survival in a harsh environment. At the age of six, he became a blood brother of the Blackfeet, an honour bestowed on few white men.
In early 1923, when Ron was twelve, he and his family moved to Washington state, where his father was stationed at the local naval base. He joined the Boy Scouts and that year proudly achieved the rank of Boy Scout First Class. The next year he became America’s youngest Eagle Scout* ever, an early indication that he did not plan to live an ordinary life.
* Eagle Scout — highest award in American scouting.
