ideographs: written symbols that represent an idea or object directly, rather than by particular words or speech sounds, as Chinese or Japanese characters.
jack: money.
Kawasaki KDA-5: a fighter biplane built by Kawasaki, a Japanese aircraft manufacturer founded in 1918. The first prototype flew in 1932; 380 of these planes were built.
key: a hand-operated device used to transmit Morse code messages.
leatherneck: a member of the US Marine Corps. The phrase comes from the early days of the Marine Corps when enlisted men were given strips of leather to wear around their necks. The popular concept was that the leather protected the neck from a saber slash, though it was actually used to keep the Marines from slouching in uniform by forcing them to keep their heads up.
Legation: the official headquarters of a diplomatic minister.
lighters: large open flat-bottomed barges, used in loading and unloading ships offshore or in transporting goods for short distances in shallow waters.
mean: unimposing or shabby.
men-o’-war: armed ships of a national navy usually carrying between twenty and one hundred and twenty guns.
Mex: Mexican peso; in 1732 it was introduced as a trade coin with China and was so popular that China became one of its principal consumers. Mexico minted and exported pesos to China until 1949. It was issued as both coins and paper money.
Mikado: the emperor of Japan; a title no longer used.
Mon o akero!: (Japanese) Open the gate!
Native Quarter: also Native City; deep in the center of Peking, far from the ordinary people, was the Forbidden City, where the Emperor resided and carried out the affairs of state. It was spread out over a large area with audience halls, libraries and theaters, all reserved solely for the emperor. Surrounding this area was the Imperial City, with granaries, temples, residences for high officials and workshops of artisans who provided services and goods for the imperial household. Circling that was the Tartar City, occupied by the military men; and to the south was the Native City, where the Chinese resided. Each of these cities within cities had its own walls, which were clearly organized and defined the status of its residents.
Nic: Nicaragua; from 1927 until 1933 there was guerrilla warfare against the Nicaraguan government and the US Marines that were sent to defend US interests.
Nippon: the native Japanese name for Japan.
OD: (military) olive drab.
Old Glory: a common nickname for the flag of the US, bestowed by William Driver (1803–1886), an early nineteenth-century American sea captain. Given the flag as a gift, he hung it from his ship’s mast and hailed it as “Old Glory” when he left harbor for a trip around the world (1831–1832) as commander of a whaling vessel. Old Glory served as the ship’s official flag throughout the voyage.
PC: Post Command; military installation where the command personnel are located.
Peking: now Beijing, China.
pince-nez: a pair of glasses held on the face by a spring that grips the nose.
pipe down for chow: on sailing ships, a pipe (whistlelike device) was used to communicate orders via different arrangements of notes. “Pipe down for chow” was the signal used to announce meals.
Portsmouth: US Naval and Marine prison located in Maine and occupied from 1908 until 1974.
powder, took a: made a speedy departure; ran away.
radio: a radio message; a radiogram.
redeye: cheap, strong whiskey.
Rising Sun: Japan; the characters that make up Japan’s name mean “the sun’s origin,” which is why Japan is sometimes identified as the “Land of the Rising Sun.” It is also the military flag of Japan and was used as the ensign of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the war flag of the Imperial Japanese Army until the end of World War II.
Scheherazade: the female narrator of The Arabian Nights, who during one thousand and one adventurous nights saved her life by entertaining her husband, the king, with stories.
scuppered: ruined; wrecked.
scuppers are under: when a ship is too heavily loaded that its scuppers (openings in the side of a ship at deck level that allow water to run off) are under water. Used figuratively.
sea anchor: a device, such as a conical canvas bag, that is thrown overboard and dragged behind a ship to control its speed or heading.
Shanghai: city of eastern China at the mouth of the Yangtze River, and the largest city in the country. Shanghai was opened to foreign trade by treaty in 1842 and quickly prospered. France, Great Britain and the United States all held large concessions (rights to use land granted by a government) in the city until the early twentieth century.
Shantung: the dialect spoken in Shantung, a peninsula in east China extending into the Yellow Sea.
Shen Province: also known as Shensi or Shaanxi; north central province neighboring Shan Province.
shin the chains: leave the ship without permission.
sideslip: (of an aircraft when excessively banked) to slide sideways, toward the center of the curve described in turning.
slip cable: to leave a place; part company. From the nautical phrase “to slip cable” which means to let go of the anchor cable (let it slip off the ship) when a quick departure is needed and time cannot be spared to raise the anchor.
stanchion: an upright bar, post or frame forming a support or barrier.
swagger coat: a woman’s pyramid-shaped coat with a full flared back and usually raglan sleeves (sleeves extending to the collar of a garment instead of ending at the shoulder), first popularized in the 1930s.
taii: (Japanese) a lieutenant.
tanglefoot: a strong drink, especially cheap whisky.
three sheets to the wind: in a disordered state caused by drinking; intoxicated. This expression is generally thought to refer to the sheet (a rope or chain) that holds one or both lower corners of a sail. If the sheet is allowed to go slack in the wind, the sail flaps about and the boat is tossed about much as a drunk staggers. Having three sheets loose would presumably make the situation all the worse.
Tientsin: seaport located southeast of Peking; China’s third largest city and major transportation and trading center. Tientsin was a “Treaty Port,” a generic term used to denote Chinese cities open to foreign residence and trade, usually the result of a treaty.
tin can: an improvised hand grenade, made by filling tin cans with bits of iron and a high explosive in which a fuse cord was inserted. The cord was lighted and the can with the sputtering fuse was thrown into the enemy lines.
toesmithing: among people of the theater, a term for dancing.
tonneau: the rear seating compartment of an automobile.
trick: a period or turn of duty.
under weigh: in motion; underway.
USMC: United States Marine Corps.
USN: United States Navy.
USS: United States Ship.
“white man’s burden”: from a poem written by Rudyard Kipling originally published in 1899 with regard to the US conquest of the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies. Subject to different interpretations, it was latched onto by imperialists to justify colonialism as a noble enterprise. Much of Kipling’s other writings suggested that he genuinely believed in the benevolent role that the introduction of Western ideas could play in lifting non-Western peoples out of “poverty and ignorance.”
White Russian: a Russian who fought against the Bolsheviks (Russian Communist Party) in the Russian Revolution, and fought against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921.
whitewash: a white liquid that is a mixture of lime or powdered chalk and water, used for making walls or ceilings white.
L. Ron Hubbard in the
Golden Age of
Pulp Fiction
In writing an adventure story
a writer has to know that he is adventuring
for a lot of people who cannot.
The writer has to take them here and there
about the globe and sh
ow them
excitement and love and realism.
As long as that writer is living the part of an
adventurer when he is hammering
the keys, he is succeeding with his story.
Adventuring is a state of mind.
If you adventure through life, you have a
good chance to be a success on paper.
Adventure doesn’t mean globe-trotting,
exactly, and it doesn’t mean great deeds.
Adventuring is like art.
You have to live it to make it real.
— L. Ron Hubbard
L. Ron Hubbard
and American
Pulp Fiction
BORN March 13, 1911, L. Ron Hubbard lived a life at least as expansive as the stories with which he enthralled a hundred million readers through a fifty-year career.
Originally hailing from Tilden, Nebraska, he spent his formative years in a classically rugged Montana, replete with the cowpunchers, lawmen and desperadoes who would later people his Wild West adventures. And lest anyone imagine those adventures were drawn from vicarious experience, he was not only breaking broncs at a tender age, he was also among the few whites ever admitted into Blackfoot society as a bona fide blood brother. While if only to round out an otherwise rough and tumble youth, his mother was that rarity of her time—a thoroughly educated woman—who introduced her son to the classics of Occidental literature even before his seventh birthday.
But as any dedicated L. Ron Hubbard reader will attest, his world extended far beyond Montana. In point of fact, and as the son of a United States naval officer, by the age of eighteen he had traveled over a quarter of a million miles. Included therein were three Pacific crossings to a then still mysterious Asia, where he ran with the likes of Her British Majesty’s agent-in-place for North China, and the last in the line of Royal Magicians from the court of Kublai Khan. For the record, L. Ron Hubbard was also among the first Westerners to gain admittance to forbidden Tibetan monasteries below Manchuria, and his photographs of China’s Great Wall long graced American geography texts.
Upon his return to the United States and a hasty completion of his interrupted high school education, the young Ron Hubbard entered George Washington University. There, as fans of his aerial adventures may have heard, he earned his wings as a pioneering barnstormer at the dawn of American aviation. He also earned a place in free-flight record books for the longest sustained flight above Chicago. Moreover, as a roving reporter for Sportsman Pilot (featuring his first professionally penned articles), he further helped inspire a generation of pilots who would take America to world airpower.
L. Ron Hubbard, left, at Congressional Airport, Washington, DC, 1931, with members of George Washington University flying club.
Immediately beyond his sophomore year, Ron embarked on the first of his famed ethnological expeditions, initially to then untrammeled Caribbean shores (descriptions of which would later fill a whole series of West Indies mystery-thrillers). That the Puerto Rican interior would also figure into the future of Ron Hubbard stories was likewise no accident. For in addition to cultural studies of the island, a 1932–33 LRH expedition is rightly remembered as conducting the first complete mineralogical survey of a Puerto Rico under United States jurisdiction.
There was many another adventure along this vein: As a lifetime member of the famed Explorers Club, L. Ron Hubbard charted North Pacific waters with the first shipboard radio direction finder, and so pioneered a long-range navigation system universally employed until the late twentieth century. While not to put too fine an edge on it, he also held a rare Master Mariner’s license to pilot any vessel, of any tonnage in any ocean.
Capt. L. Ron Hubbard in Ketchikan, Alaska, 1940, on his Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition, the first of three voyages conducted under the Explorers Club Flag.
Yet lest we stray too far afield, there is an LRH note at this juncture in his saga, and it reads in part:
“I started out writing for the pulps, writing the best I knew, writing for every mag on the stands, slanting as well as I could.”
To which one might add: His earliest submissions date from the summer of 1934, and included tales drawn from true-to-life Asian adventures, with characters roughly modeled on British/American intelligence operatives he had known in Shanghai. His early Westerns were similarly peppered with details drawn from personal experience. Although therein lay a first hard lesson from the often cruel world of the pulps. His first Westerns were soundly rejected as lacking the authenticity of a Max Brand yarn (a particularly frustrating comment given L. Ron Hubbard’s Westerns came straight from his Montana homeland, while Max Brand was a mediocre New York poet named Frederick Schiller Faust, who turned out implausible six-shooter tales from the terrace of an Italian villa).
Nevertheless, and needless to say, L. Ron Hubbard persevered and soon earned a reputation as among the most publishable names in pulp fiction, with a ninety percent placement rate of first-draft manuscripts. He was also among the most prolific, averaging between seventy and a hundred thousand words a month. Hence the rumors that L. Ron Hubbard had redesigned a typewriter for faster keyboard action and pounded out manuscripts on a continuous roll of butcher paper to save the precious seconds it took to insert a single sheet of paper into manual typewriters of the day.
L. Ron Hubbard, circa 1930, at the outset of a literary career that would finally span half a century.
That all L. Ron Hubbard stories did not run beneath said byline is yet another aspect of pulp fiction lore. That is, as publishers periodically rejected manuscripts from top-drawer authors if only to avoid paying top dollar, L. Ron Hubbard and company just as frequently replied with submissions under various pseudonyms. In Ron’s case, the list included: Rene Lafayette, Captain Charles Gordon, Lt. Scott Morgan and the notorious Kurt von Rachen—supposedly on the lam for a murder rap, while hammering out two-fisted prose in Argentina. The point: While L. Ron Hubbard as Ken Martin spun stories of Southeast Asian intrigue, LRH as Barry Randolph authored tales of romance on the Western range—which, stretching between a dozen genres is how he came to stand among the two hundred elite authors providing close to a million tales through the glory days of American Pulp Fiction.
A Man of Many Names
Between 1934 and 1950, L. Ron Hubbard authored more than fifteen million words of fiction in more than two hundred classic publications.
To supply his fans and editors with stories across an array of genres and pulp titles, he adopted fifteen pseudonyms in addition to his already renowned L. Ron Hubbard byline.
______
Winchester Remington Colt
Lt. Jonathan Daly
Capt. Charles Gordon
Capt. L. Ron Hubbard
Bernard Hubbel
Michael Keith
Rene Lafayette
Legionnaire 148
Legionnaire 14830
Ken Martin
Scott Morgan
Lt. Scott Morgan
Kurt von Rachen
Barry Randolph
Capt. Humbert Reynolds
In evidence of exactly that, by 1936 L. Ron Hubbard was literally leading pulp fiction’s elite as president of New York’s American Fiction Guild. Members included a veritable pulp hall of fame: Lester “Doc Savage” Dent, Walter “The Shadow” Gibson, and the legendary Dashiell Hammett—to cite but a few.
Also in evidence of just where L. Ron Hubbard stood within his first two years on the American pulp circuit: By the spring of 1937, he was ensconced in Hollywood, adopting a Caribbean thriller for Columbia Pictures, remembered today as The Secret of Treasure Island. Comprising fifteen thirty-minute episodes, the L. Ron Hubbard screenplay led to the most profitable matinée serial in Hollywood history. In accord with Hollywood culture, he was thereafter continually called upon to rewrite/doctor scripts—most famously for long-time friend and fellow adventurer Clark Gable.
The 1937 Secret of Treasure Island a fifteen-episode serial adapted f
or the screen by L. Ron Hubbard from his novel, Murder at Pirate Castle.
In the interim—and herein lies another distinctive chapter of the L. Ron Hubbard story—he continually worked to open Pulp Kingdom gates to up-and-coming authors. Or, for that matter, anyone who wished to write. It was a fairly unconventional stance, as markets were already thin and competition razor sharp. But the fact remains, it was an L. Ron Hubbard hallmark that he vehemently lobbied on behalf of young authors—regularly supplying instructional articles to trade journals, guest-lecturing to short story classes at George Washington University and Harvard, and even founding his own creative writing competition. It was established in 1940, dubbed the Golden Pen, and guaranteed winners both New York representation and publication in Argosy.
But it was John W. Campbell Jr.’s Astounding Science Fiction that finally proved the most memorable LRH vehicle. While every fan of L. Ron Hubbard’s galactic epics undoubtedly knows the story, it nonetheless bears repeating: By late 1938, the pulp publishing magnate of Street & Smith was determined to revamp Astounding Science Fiction for broader readership. In particular, senior editorial director F. Orlin Tremaine called for stories with a stronger human element. When acting editor John W. Campbell balked, preferring his spaceship-driven tales, Tremaine enlisted Hubbard. Hubbard, in turn, replied with the genre’s first truly character-driven works, wherein heroes are pitted not against bug-eyed monsters but the mystery and majesty of deep space itself—and thus was launched the Golden Age of Science Fiction.