Hubbard the Explorer

or, Expedition Dianetics

The first published version of Dianetics was not in Astounding Science Fiction nor in a hardbound book edition. Instead it was in The Explorers Journal, the organ of the Explorers Club of New York, in its issue of Winter/Spring 1950 (Vol. XXVIII, No. 1). Written by L. Ron Hubbard--but in the passive voice--this version is entitled "Terra Incognita: The Mind." You can read it yourself by clicking here. Hubbard's essay is only three and a half pages long, yet it includes some basics of Dianetics (the word is capitalized in the original). It also introduces the word and concept comanome, later to evolve into the engram.

Strangely, Hubbard was a member of the Explorers Club, his membership having dated to February 19, 1940. On June 27, 1940, he set off on what he called the Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition. Sailing under Explorers Club flag number 105, he captained a yacht called--ironically or not--Magician. Hubbard was given to boasting and mock heroics. His great radio expedition turned out to be more or less a fiasco, and he returned stateside half a year after beginning.

Volney G. Mathison, who contributed to Weird Tales, was an oceangoing radio operator. I had thought that he and Hubbard might have crossed paths as early as 1940, on the West Coast or in Alaska. But what I have read since writing about Mathison leads me to think that he and Hubbard didn't meet until the early 1950s, or, at the earliest, the late 1940s. In any case, Hubbard went on to lead two more expeditions flying the flag of the Explorers Club (flag number 163), in 1961 for his Oceanographic-Archeological [sic] Expedition, and in 1966 for his Hubbard Geological Survey Expedition. By 1961, Mathison had long broken with Hubbard. By 1966, he was in his grave.

* * *

Dianetics is an old word. Originally spelled dianoetics, it was first used in print in 1677. Citing the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Jon Atack, author of the essay "Possible Origins for Dianetics and Scientology" (click here to read it), is the source of that piece of information. Mr. Atack also suggested that Hubbard derived dianetics from the name of the Greek goddess Diana, a prominent figure in Aleister Crowley's supposed magic. Hubbard went on to name one of his daughters and one of his vessels Diana.

Dianoetic was in newspapers before 1900. The first occurrences of the word dianetic in American newspapers that I have found are from 1923 and 1926. In these items, dianetic is used as an adjective and not a noun. The usage seems to me nonsensical and absurd, like someone is putting us on. It also seems to me that the spelling dianetic is just a simplification of dianoetic. It would have to wait until early 1950, as far as I can tell, for the word Dianetics as a noun to occur in print in reference to a kind of psychology or pseudo-psychology. Read on . . .

Newspaper columnist Walter Winchell gets the credit for breaking the story of a coming Dianetics. On January 30, 1950, he wrote:

     There is something new coming in April called dianetics. (1) A new science that works with the invariability of physical science in the field of the human mind. From all indications it will prove to be as revolutionary for humanity as the first caveman's discovery and utilization of fire. (2)

Note the phrase "the invariability of physical science." In that, I detect the influence of John W. Campbell, Jr., who was in fact a physical scientist and seemingly keen on applying scientific principles to "the field of the human mind." I have tried to figure out a possible connection between Winchell and Campbell, Winchell and Hubbard, or Winchell and science fiction in general but have come up empty. (3) It seems to me that in early 1950, Hubbard and Campbell were trying to hype their new invention. What better way than to drop a hint with one of the most widely read newspaper columnists in America? (4) And why wouldn't Winchell publish a bit of gossip? That was his coin. Better to be wrong than to lose a scoop . . .

Except that Winchell was scooped, for Dianetics was mentioned in a newspaper item published twelve days prior to his January 31 column. On January 19, 1950, an anonymous reporter wrote:

Move to New Jersey -- Dr. and Mrs. J.A. Winter and family left yesterday to make their home in Bayside, N.J., where Dr. Winter is to continue his work in dianetics. Their home at 1614 Forres [sic] avenue will be occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Phillip Malloy.

The source is The Herald-Palladium of Benton Harbor, Michigan, page 3.

And that's where my research for this series began.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) The publication of Hubbard's Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was delayed a few days, until May 9, 1950.
(2) From the column "Gossip of the Nation" in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 31, 1950, p. 19. Winchell's column was of course in many other papers that day.
(3) Robert A. Heinlein later referred to a fictional gossip columnist as a "winchell" in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). It seems to me that Heinlein was in the habit of trying to immortalize contemporary things. It didn't often work, and it makes him sound like somebody's old grandpa who talks about things from long ago that nobody now understands.
(4) There were newspapermen and broadcasters in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), but not Walter Winchell. These were: Kenneth Kendall, who was later in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Elmer Davis, previously editor of the pulp magazine Adventure; and H.V. Kaltenborn. Dorothy Kilgallen was also a gossip columnist. She wrote more than once about flying saucers. Some conspiracy theorists believe that her mysterious death is an example of the silencing of people who knew too much about flying saucers. On August 18, 1950, she wrote about Hubbard's brainchild:

     Dianetics, the new "scientific" parlor game which swept California recently, has begun to catch on in the Gotham set that likes to discuss its neuroses . . . (Ellipses in the original, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Aug. 18, 1950, p. 22.)

The Explorers Journal, Winter-Spring 1950. The photograph on the cover looks like it could have been taken in Alaska. Does it date from L. Ron Hubbard's radio expedition to that place in 1940? And could that be the silhouette of Polly Hubbard, first wife of the inventor of Dianetics? Or is it the silhouette of a man?

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965)-Part 7

Personal Life & End

Less than a month after his nineteenth birthday, on September 6, 1916, Volney Mathison married in Columbia County, Oregon. Unfortunately I don't know the name of his bride. It's safe to assume that she was her husband's first wife but not his last. However, there is some confusion on the Internet as to Mathison's marriages. I think that confusion comes from an odd article in the Los Angeles Times from 1935, odd only in light of other facts about his life. Unless Mathison played games with the truth (and if I interpret the facts correctly), the situation was this: Volney Mathison married Dorothy Jean Ashley, nicknamed Jean, in about 1929. The two remained married for the rest of their lives.

Born in Huntington, Indiana, on July 18, 1907, Dorothy Ashley was the daughter of an Illinois barber who died sometime between 1920 and 1930. At the time of the 1930 census, Volney and Dorothy Mathison were living in Berkeley, California, with her mother and her sister, Roberta A. Ashley, also called Audrey. (1) In 1935, the Los Angeles Times unintentionally threw a wrench in the works of this account by reporting:

Jean Darrell, music librarian for the local N.B.C. headquarters, returned from her vacation with a husband--Volney Mathison, who is engaged in [the] shortwave radio business.

The situation is confused further with this, from the same paper, thirty years later:

MATHISON, Jean, beloved wife of Volney Mathison, loving daughter of Mrs. Theodore Warkentin, sister of Audrey Ashley. Services at Pierce Brothers' Los Angeles Mortuary, 720 W. Washington Blvd. (2)

The California Death Index reports that Dorothy J. Mathison, born July 18, 1907, in Indiana, died on November 9, 1964, in Los Angeles--obviously the same woman. (The cemetery where she was buried gives her full name: Dorothy Jean Mathison.) So how is it possible that a woman named Jean Darrell fetched back a husband from her 1935 vacation when that same man was married to Dorothy Jean Ashley from Indiana? Did he divorce Dorothy Ashley, then remarry her after a hypothetical marriage to this Jean Darrell ended? Was Mathison a bigamist (like L. Ron Hubbard)? Or did Jean Mathison go by the name Jean Darrell? If so, why? Maybe the Times meant to say that she returned from her vacation with her husband instead of with a husband. Or maybe the couple had kept their marriage of circa 1929 secret, only to make it public in 1935. The simplest answer may be the best: the article from 1935 is misleading. Who did the misleading? Probably the Mathisons. And who has been misled? Everyone who believes Volney Mathison was married just once to a woman named Jean Darrell in 1935.

In any case, Jean Mathison, Volney Mathison's wife, died on November 9, 1964, at age fifty-seven. Ten years her senior, Volney outlived her by only two months, dying on January 3, 1965, in Los Angeles. He was buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park as she was before him. There weren't any survivors listed in Mathison's death announcement. L. Ron Hubbard survived however, and on June 7, 1965, while the flowers on Volney's grave were practically still fresh, the founder of the Church of Scientology filed a patent for a "Device for Measuring and Indicating Changes in the Resistance of a Human Body." The patent--U.S. Patent 3,290,589--was issued on December 6, 1966. Hubbard had finally wrested the Mathison Electropsychometer from its inventor. (3)

Volney G. Mathison

Radioman, Seaman, Labor Spokesman, Inventor, Author, Chiropractor, Psychoanalyst

Born August 13, 1897, Paducah, Texas
Died January 3, 1965, Los Angeles, California

Volney Mathison's Story in Weird Tales
"The Death Bottle" (Mar. 1925)

Further Reading
Because of his association with L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics, and the Church of Scientology, Volney G. Mathison has received mention in books on those subjects. If you would like to read more about him, I would suggest finding books on Hubbard and his followers. For more on wireless telegraphy and radio, start with a history of radio or a biography of Guglielmo Marconi, David Sarnoff, or other pioneers in the field. For more on radio in Southern California, see an interesting website called Radio City Hollywood, here. You can find out more about Anthony Cornero Stralla by looking at books on organized crime, the Mafia, and the history of Las Vegas. Going farther back, you can read about Henry George and the single tax in any number of books and on any number of websites. Wikipedia might be a good place to start. Finally, to find out more about Hugo Gernsback and the origins of science fiction magazines, see a history of science fiction such as Alternate Worlds by James Gunn (1975), A Pictorial History of Science Fiction by David Kyle (1976), or Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction (1963) by Sam Moskowitz.

Notes:
(1) A woman named Audrey Ashley is credited as co-author of the story on which the movie Raw Deal (1948) was based. Her collaborator was Arnold B. Anthony. That may be the same pseudonymous author of the novel Parched Earth (1934), a story about agricultural workers in California (perhaps like Volney Mathison's father) and dedicated to the author's mother, "Who has known the heartbreak of lean harvests" (like Mathison's mother). My feeling is that Arnold B. Anthony was not Volney Mathison, but it's always good to consider possibilities.

(2) Theodore Warkentin was a boatbuilder, carpenter, and stevedore in California.
(3) The following year, Hubbard--like Tony the Hat before him--took to the sea where he could operate away from watching eyes.
Postscript (Aug. 14, 2016): It seems likely to me that--given his father's interest in intellectual ideas--Volney George Mathison was named after the French author, intellectual, and politician Count Constantin de Volney (1757-1820). Although he was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Volney also associated himself with the intellectuals behind the French Revolution and with their ideas. These men tended to be religious skeptics, materialists, or atheists. They also tended--as history has shown--towards pseudoscience and otherwise crackpot ideas about economics, politics, philosophy, science, and human nature.

  

"Looking North on Vine Street from Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California," a postcard of the 1930s or '40s. This was the milieu of countless stars, executives, and technicians, as well as Volney and Jean Mathison, the fictional Philip Marlowe, and the infamous real-life case of the Black Dahlia.

Original text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965)-Part 6

The Mathison E-Meter

The history of Volney Mathison's involvement with L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology is a dark and tangled one, obscured not only by the passage of time but also apparently by design. By the 1940s, Mathison, a builder and operator of radio equipment and a budding "psychoanalyst," was living in southern California and beginning to experiment with the polygraph machine, popularly known as the lie detector. Invented by John Augustus Larson (1892-1965) and based in part on work by William Moulton Marston (1893-1947), the polygraph came into existence in 1921. Other men developed variations on the invention in the 1930s and '40s. (1) According to several sources (including Wikipedia), Mathison invented his own variation, called the electroencephaloneuromentimograph, electropsychometer, or simply E-meter, in the 1940s. Mathison also developed techniques of psychoanalysis using the machine and a form of self-hypnosis. To top it all off, Mathison--like Hugo Gernsback with his radio equipment many years before--marketed E-meters, audio tapes, and books through catalogs and advertisements. The idea was to use Mathison's equipment and techniques to explore the secret workings of the troubled mind and to relieve its suffering. (2)

Meanwhile, L. Ron Hubbard left active duty service in the U.S. Navy and arrived in Pasadena in the same month the war ended, August 1945. Wikipedia offers an informative account of Hubbard's activities in southern California in the immediate post-war period. According to that account, Hubbard left the state in 1948 and began developing what would become Dianetics, "the science of the mind," which was announced in John W. Campbell's Astounding in May 1950. Whether Mathison and Hubbard had met in southern California or not, they seem to have been on the same track by the early 1950s.

According to one source, there wasn't any mention of the E-meter in the early days of Dianetics. That would imply that Hubbard and his followers had not yet learned of Mathison's machine or that they had not yet integrated it into their practice. In any case, by the early 1950s, Volney Mathison and L. Ron Hubbard were associates, and Hubbard's auditors were putting Mathison's E-meter to use. Apparently Mathison retained control and ownership of his invention despite pressure from Hubbard to relinquish it. (3) That appears to have been the reason for their falling out.

Decades before, when Volney Mathison was a boy, his father had instructed him:

You see, you can't believe much of what you hear. You must use your own eyes, read up-to-date scientific books, and always find out what is really going on. One must be wary about believing things people declare are 'eternal truths'. One must always investigate and find out the facts.

Mathison's own words from 1954--about the time he and Hubbard parted ways--echo those of his father. In Creative Image Therapy, he wrote:

Don't be tricked by any faker, whether he claims to be holy, "illuminated", or "scientific." There are charlatans who promise--even through the U. S. mails, so stupidly reckless are they--to heal or transform you for large sums of money--some by esoteric "teachings", others by their mere presence or by their invoking some mysterious Power. . . . The faker who hypnotizes you out of your money is not himself a sane, whole, and happy man--he is usually operating, puppet-like, on some deep, uncleared set of subconscious image patterns as brutal as those of some stray killer shark.

Mathison could very well have been writing of L. Ron Hubbard. It's interesting to note that his words--"uncleared set of subconscious image patterns"--echo those of the belief that had by then become Scientology.

For four years, from 1954 to 1958, Hubbard discouraged the use of the E-meter in the process of auditing. Then, in 1958, Don Breeding and Joe Wallis patented their own version of the E-meter. Smaller than Mathison's version and powered by batteries, the new device was dubbed the "Hubbard E-meter" and Scientology no longer needed the Mathison E-meter. Whether Mathison continued to have contact with or involvement in the organization is an open question. I suspect that Mathison--who seems to have been his own man in all things--would not have stuck with any organization for long. In any case, Mathison went about his work, authoring a number of booklets during the last full decade of his life. Their titles offer clues as to the nature of Mathison's work:

• Super-Visualization: The Duplication Techniques of Applied Creative Energy, Volume 1 (1950)
• Creative Image Therapy (1954)
• Electropsychometry (1954 or 1955)
• The Power and Glory of Sex (1956)
• How to Achieve Past Life Recalls (1956) published by Mathison Electropsychometers
• The Secret of the Lourdes Miracles Revealed (1956)
• Practical Self-Hypnosis: How to Achieve and Effectively to Use Hypnosis without the Presence of an Operator (1957)
• Space-Age Self-Hypnosis (1957)
• The Secret Power of the Crystal Pendulum: How to Use It (1958) published by the Institute of Self-Hypnosis

To be concluded . . . 

Notes
(1) Larson, like Mathison, was of Scandinavian descent. Coincidentally, the two men died within months of each other in 1965. Marston by the way was also creator of Wonder Woman, who had her own lie detector in the form of a golden lasso. All three men--Larson, Mathison, and Marston--were based in California and engaged in the same kinds of inquiries. The question is, did they ever meet?
(2) The dates of these developments are unknown.
(3) In my search for patents by Volney G. Mathison and for his E-meter, I couldn't find anything from before 1954. The Aberee reported on Mathison's vying with the U.S. Patent Office in its July/August 1954 issue. If that report is accurate, Mathison appears to have first applied for a patent in 1951. He received patents in 1954 and 1957.

The Mathison Electropsychometer or E-meter.

Who knew there could be a connection between Wonder Woman, Weird Tales, and Scientology?

Original text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965)-Part 5

Volney Mathison on the Fringes

Between the wars, Volney Mathison made his living as a builder and operator of radio equipment, also as a seaman, an author, and a labor leader. The Wikipedia entry on Mathison generously describes him as a chiropractor and psychoanalyst as well. I have yet to find any evidence that he was trained in either field, but then anyone--then or now--can call himself a psychoanalyst. Chiropractic on the other hand requires extensive training, although I don't know that chiropractors of the 1930s and '40s had to undergo the same kind of training as their counterparts do today. In any case, it might be a little informative to consider some coincidences and connections:

Chiropractic was founded in 1894 in Davenport, Iowa, by a man whose surname--Palmer--is one of the finest double entendres (1) you're likely to encounter anytime soon. Coincidentally or not, the Fairhope Industrial Association was founded that same year in Des Moines for purposes of establishing a colony where Henry George's theory of the single tax could be enacted. Three years later--in the same year Volney Mathison was born--D.D. Palmer opened the Palmer School of Chiropractic in Davenport, the first of its kind. Finally, D.D. Palmer was treated by Andrew Taylor Still, the father of osteopathy, prior to Palmer's founding of chiropractic; the Henry George Foundation of Australia was founded by Edgar Culley, one of the first osteopaths in Australia.

Why informative? I think these and other facts in the life of Volney Mathison present a picture of a man who operated along the fringes in almost every way: in economics (Georgism), literature (pulp fiction), the law (his association with Tony the Hat), psychology ("psychoanalysis"), medicine (chiropractic), science (his invention of the E-meter), religion (Dianetics and Scientology), and even--in his wanderings up and down western coastal waters--this broad continent. It seems clear to me that Volney Mathison just wasn't made for a conventional or conformist way of life.

L. Ron Hubbard

I don't know when or under what circumstances Volney Mathison and L. Ron Hubbard met, but in relative terms, they must have had some pretty close brushes at various times from the 1920s through the 1940s. Born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911, Hubbard was the son of a navy man who was stationed on the West Coast beginning in 1921. Hubbard attended high school in Bremerton and Seattle, Washington, at about the time Mathison--fourteen years his senior--was plying the waters off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Apparently unlike Mathison, Hubbard attended college, at least for a time. He also began writing. During the early 1930s--at about the same time Mathison's writing career was winding down--Hubbard's was just getting started. He would go on to write scores of stories, making his name known in the field of science fiction. (2)

L. Ron Hubbard and his followers have built a cult of personality around the founder of Scientology. Their claims remind me of the claims made by Jong Kim-il, Muammar Gaddafi, or some other boastful dictator on his own great accomplishments. Although Hubbard sailed to Alaska in 1940, there was no "Alaskan Radio-Experimental Expedition." (Volney Mathison was more likely to have accomplished something like that.) And although he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II, Hubbard did not see combat--there were no engagements with enemy submarines, no combat injuries, and no twenty-one medals. Hubbard was in fact relieved of his command for shelling Mexican territory in 1943. In 1946, he was transferred to inactive duty, and in 1950, Hubbard resigned his commission. The upshot of all this is that Hubbard spent a good deal of time on the West Coast as a navy man. He may very well have met Volney Mathison then. I think it's more likely the two men met when Hubbard began moving in southern California circles of the occult and the paranormal following the war.

To be continued . . . 

Notes

(1) You could also call it a triple entendre depending on your opinion of chiropractic.

(2) The credits I have for Volney Mathison's fiction lists just three published stories after 1932, all in 1942-1943 for North-West Romances. According to Wikipedia, Hubbard made his first sales (non-fiction) in 1932-1933. His first published short story was in Thrilling Adventure in February 1934.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965)-Part 4

Hugo Gernsback and "Scientifiction"

As I write this (January 2012), the members of the World Science Fiction Convention have begun accepting nominations for this year's Hugo Awards. The Hugos have been given out every year since 1955 in various categories: best novel, best novelette, best short story, and so on. You could call them the Oscars of science fiction. To most people, the name "Oscar" refers to the statuette itself, a somewhat abstract figure holding a sword. The name "Hugo" on the other hand refers to a real person, Hugo Gernsback, sometimes called the father of science fiction, or at least, of science fiction magazines. Born in Luxembourg in 1884, Hugo Gernsback emigrated to the United States in 1904 and immediately got down to business making and selling batteries. That business soon went bust, but Gernsback--never one to stay down for long--got into radio, forming the first mail-order firm in that field, the Electro Importing Company. Described by James Gunn as "a mixture of personal reserve and aggressive salesmanship," Gernsback marketed his own Telimco Wireless radio set and other products in a variety of ways, first through a radio catalog, then in the pages of the first magazine in the field, Modern Electrics (1908). In addition to founding Modern Electrics, Gernsback also founded the Wireless Association of America in 1909, published the first book on radio broadcasting in 1910, and predicted the development of radio networks and television. Gernsback estimated that by 1912 (the year of the Titanic disaster) there were 400,000 people involved in amateur radio in the United States.

In 1912, Gernsback sold Modern Electrics and launched The Electrical Experimenter, which became, in 1920, Science and Invention, and was soon joined by a companion magazine, Radio News. In his magazines, Hugo Gernsback printed articles, advertisements, and catalogs of radio parts. He also printed stories in a new and evolving genre variously known in its early years as scientific romance, scientific fiction, or, by Gernsback's coining, "Scientifiction." Gernsback himself authored an early example of the genre, a novel called Ralph 124C 41+, which appeared in serialized form in Modern Electrics beginning in April 1911. (1) Though not highly regarded as literature--Sam J. Lundwall called it "pitiable"-- Ralph 124C 41+ proved to be a seminal work of science fiction, with descriptions of television, radar, spaceflight, and even Skype before there were such things. Gernsback followed Ralph 124C 41+ with other scientific tales of his own. He also began publishing the work of others, including science fiction pioneers Ray Cummings (1887-1957) and George Allan England (1877-1936). In August 1923, Gernsback published a special issue of Science and Invention, a "Scientific Fiction Number," featuring a spaceman in freefall on the cover. If it was not the first magazine of its kind, that scientific fiction number soon led to the founding of the first science fiction magazine, Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, in 1926. (2)

Volney the Fictioneer

Born in Texas in 1897, Volney G. Mathison lived in Oregon, Alabama, and perhaps California as a child. He taught himself about radio, then called wireless, and acquired a radio operator's license at age sixteen. In about 1918, Mathison went to sea, probably as an operator of a shipboard radio. Based in California, he made jaunts up and down the West Coast, to Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and probably Alaska aboard tramp steamers. We can imagine a young man with an active and inquisitive mind, manning his radio set aboard ship but with many idle hours in which to occupy himself. Mathison must have known and read Hugo Gernsback's radio magazines. If that's so, he could not have avoided encountering Gernsback's early versions of science fiction. Mathison also grew up in the era of pulp magazines such as The Argosy, The All-Story, The Blue Book Magazine, and Adventure and would have been well acquainted with their brand of fiction. At some point in his seagoing career, Mathison must have decided to give writing fiction a try.

In his brief third-person memoir from the 1950s, Mathison recalled: "He became an adventure fiction writer, and wrote steadily on shipboard while the the vessel was underway." Beginning writers are advised to write what they know. Volney Mathison followed that advice. According to Everett Bleiler, Mathison had "two short pieces" printed in Hugo Gernsback's Radio News. It shouldn't come as any further surprise that Mathison's first magazine credit (the first I have found anyway) was called "The Radio Rescue," a novel published in Sea Stories for October 5, 1922. Mathison followed that up with his first (and perhaps only) hardbound novel, The Radiobuster, Being Some of the Adventures of Samuel Jones, Deep Sea Wireless Operator (Frederick K. Stokes Company, 1924). Descriptions of the book suggest that it's a kind of twentieth century Odyssey. It even includes a trip to Mars. "While contemptible as literature," writes the Website of the Maritime Radio Historical Society of America, "it undoubtedly holds pride of place as the only novel written about the trials of a radioman at a fisheries radio station in Alaska." It's no stretch of the imagination to believe that Mathison had been to such a station and may even have manned one during his many years at sea. (3)

Mathison sold several more tales to Sea Stories between 1924 and 1929, including a series featuring the character Zig Jones. I don't know whether Zig is related to Sam, but the latter showed up again in "The Mongolians' Ray," a story for Amazing Stories for that magazine's June 1929 issue. Mathison also wrote for Weird Tales, the first magazine devoted to fantasy fiction, contributing "The Death Bottle" to the March 1925 issue of "The Unique Magazine." Writing under his own name and the pseudonym Dex Volney, Mathison was also published in People's Magazine, Action Stories, Action Novels, Shorts Stories, Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, and other pulp titles of the 1920s and '30s. His story "Thor Olsen's Ace" was selected for inclusion in The World's Best Short Stories of 1930. According to Everett Bleiler, Mathison may have been living in New York City and employed with the Pacific Radio Company at the time he contributed stories to Street and Smith (i.e., in about 1932).

In view of Mathison's later association with L. Ron Hubbard, "The Mongolians' Ray," from Amazing Stories, offers an interesting insight into the author. In their book Worlds of Tomorrow, Forrest J Ackerman and Brad Linaweaver assert:

In this story, [Mathison] created the fictional device that shortly after the introduction of Dianetics, morphed into reality as the E-meter employed today to supposedly reveal the personalities of individuals interested in becoming 'clears' in the Dianetic regimen. (4)

Science fiction historian Everett Bleiler described the story in a different way, writing:

Samuel Jones, former telegraph operator, is associated with Mazerka Magazine in a program to expose scientific hoaxes, fraudulent mediums, and similar disreputable phenomena. (5)

I have already discussed Volney Mathison's attempts to cast himself in the role of the science-minded skeptic. It would seem that--paradoxically--he was not always a critical thinker and may even have been a little gullible, for he associated himself with the kind of people Samuel Jones, former telegraph operator, was in the business of exposing as fakes.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Ralph 124C 41+ ran as a twelve-part serial, meaning, I take it, that the last part was published in March 1912, the month before the Titanic went to the ocean floor. Midway through the run of Gernsback's serial, a young writer from Chicago submitted an unfinished novel to the editor of The All-Story. Referring to the fiction he was then reading in popular magazines, the writer later explained his entry into the field: "If people were paid for writing rot such as I read I could write stories just as rotten. I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines." The author of those words was Edgar Rice Burroughs, and his finished novel was published in The All-Story beginning in February 1912 as Under the Moons of Mars, later A Princess of Mars, the first in his series of John Carter books. Could Burroughs have been speaking of Ralph 124C 41+ when he described "rot such as I read"?
(2) By the time Gernsback's scientific fiction number appeared on the newsstand, Weird Tales had been in print for half a year. Incidentally, Amazing Stories would soon fall into the hands of pulp publisher Bernarr Macfadden (1868-1955). If you want to make a web of connections: Bernarr Macfadden's empire was assumed by Ed Bodin after Macfadden's death. Bodin was L. Ron Hubbard's literary agent and mentor. L. Ron Hubbard and Volney Mathison were associates. Mathison--like Gernsback--was involved in amateur radio and contributed to Gernsback's Amazing Stories and Radio News.
(3) A review in the Harvard Crimson Bookshelf (May 9, 1924) includes a good deal of boasting, which I suspect originated with either the author or his publisher. The publisher, Stokes, characterized Mathison's novel as "the Dere Mabel of radio literature." That term--"radio literature"--suggests that there was a whole genre or sub-genre of fiction devoted to radio during those pioneering days. Perhaps it's a genre waiting to be uncovered. On the other hand, it may be better left buried. Incidentally, Sam Jones wasn't the first radio operator hero in pulp fiction. George Frank Worts (1892-1962), aka Loring Brent, told a series of tales of Peter Moore in Argosy in 1918-1919. "Peter the Brazen," as he was called, is a shipboard radio operator in the Far East. His adventures were reprinted in The Compleat Adventures of Peter the Brazen in 2003 and Peter the Brazen in 2007.
(4) Quoted in Wikipedia.
(5) When he described the story, Bleiler may not have known that Mathison was an associate of Hubbard and thus could have missed the Dianetics angle. In any case, I haven't read the story myself and can't offer an opinion on it except to say that it sounds suspiciously like an early Buck Rogers storyline.
Postscript: Wikipedia gives "A Phony Phone" as the title of one of Volney Mathison's pieces for Radio News.

Hugo Gernsback's Modern Electrics for January 1912, featuring the publisher's serialized novel, "Ralph 124C 41+." The being on the right reminds me of James Arness as the Thing from Another World.

A later reprinting of the novel with a colorful and charming cover by an unknown artist, a cover price indicating this is a British edition, and a cover image showing an early version of Skype. I wonder how much this machine might resemble Volney Mathison's E-meter.

Gernsback's Science and Invention, Scientific Fiction Number, August 1923. The spaceman looks a little like Gernsback. Was that intentional?

Volney G. Mathison's brass-pounding hero, Sam Jones, made his own trip into space in the 1924 novel The Radiobuster. At the time the novel was published, Mathison was a shipboard radio operator.

By the time Sam Jones showed up in Amazing Stories (June 1929), he was a former radio operator, and a debunker for a popular magazine. The cover is by Hugo Gernsback's workhorse, Frank R. Paul.

Volney Mathison also wrote under the name Dex Volney, the byline that appears on this cover of Action Novels for August/September 1932.

Original text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965)-Part 3

Volney the Viking

As early as 1918, Volney Mathison went to sea as a wireless operator. He had learned about radio during his teenage years, claiming an ability to "read most any up-to-date scientific book and get most everything in it of value in a few hours."

Before becoming a wireless operator, he'd worked a little on farms, but found he hated the sound of steel against the soil, such as the clink of a hoe blade against stone. . . . He even picked a little cotton, but broke out in a severe skin rash, felt ill, and earned only about 20 cents a day at this work.

His mother had hoed weeds out of a Texas cotton field as she was carrying her unborn son. Again and again she told herself, "I've got to get out of here!" Maybe by osmosis she passed on to the embryonic Volney her feelings for working in cotton. (He seemed to have believed that himself.) In any case, he left Alabama and the South as a teenager, perhaps never to return.

Son of an itinerant farmer and a woman who wanted "to get out of places," Volney Mathison set out for the West Coast sometime between 1910 and 1916. His desire--like theirs--was to wander, "to get out of places." He admitted that he could have done that by railroading, but "the genes of his Viking ancestry said: 'No, to sea!'" Mathison later claimed many years at sea on dozens of ships. (He also implied that he had been to Shanghai and Helsinki among other ports.) He called himself a seaman while registering for the draft in 1918. I have found his name on ships' manifests from 1924-1927. However long he may have been at sea and wherever he may have voyaged, Mathison preferred tramp freighters because they were always leaving one place for another. While in port, he became "idle, moody, and restless." 

Mathison kept at his seagoing ways through most of the 1920s. Even as late as 1937, he worked as a union representative and spokesman for seamen. More interesting still, in 1938, Mathison applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a radio license for a gambling ship, the "barge" SS Tango, operating out of Long Beach, California. The Tango, recently converted into a luxury casino, was one of two ships owned by Anthony Cornero Stralla (1899-1955), also known as Tony Cornero, Tony Stralla, or just plain Tony the Hat. His ships were designed to float beyond the three-mile limit and thus avoid California's prohibitions against gambling. For a quarter per head, Cornero's passengers were ferried out to the ships, where they might drop all together $300,000 per "cruise." In any case, Volney Mathison's application was denied, but Cornero's ships continued operating into the 1940s, finally to be closed down by Governor Earl Warren. It's a funny and fascinating story. You can read more about it on Wikipedia, better yet on a website called Cruising the Past, here. Incidentally, Cary Grant was in two movies linked to Tony Cornero and his gambling ships: Gambling Ship (1933) and Mr. Lucky (1943).

By the time he applied for that radio license, Mathison had worked his way through one career and into another. Both grew out of his work as a radioman, first through his writing, then through his invention of what would later be called the E-meter.

To Be Continued . . .

The SS Tango, originally Star of Scotland, Tony Cornero's converted gambling ship of the 1930s and '40s. Volney Mathison applied for a radio license for this ship in 1938. The license was denied but the ship kept raking in the cash.

Original text and captions copyright 2012, 2023, Terence E. Hanley. Quotes by Volney G. Mathison, are from "Hidden Drives Pick Our Jobs and Professions," from The Aberee, Dec. 1956,  and are presumably in the public domain.

Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965)-Part 2

Fairhope

Founded in 1894 by the twenty-eight members of the Fairhope Industrial Association, Fairhope, Alabama, was to be a community where Henry George's economic theories could be put into practice. The legend is that the community had a "fair hope" of success, and by most measures, it seems like that has been the case. In 1908, the city of Fairhope was established within the bounds of the community. Since then, Fairhope has been a gathering place for artists, writers, educators, and other intellectuals. It has also been a resort and a place for tourists. Among the many people drawn to Fairhope over the years were the family of Volney G. Mathison.

Mathison's father, Fred Mathison, intellectually inclined despite his hardscrabble life, was a follower of Henry George, so devoted in fact that sometime between 1900 and 1910, he moved his family from Oregon to Fairhope. When the 1910 census taker counted them there, Fred Mathison's wife, Bertha A. Mathison, was occupied on her own account as a "Keeper, Boarder." With her were her two children, Volney G. and Eva G. Mathison. Fred Mathison was nowhere to be found. Bertha, or Agnes as she was called in earlier records, was determined to escape the desperate poverty of the Texas dirt farm she had worked with her husband. By 1910 she had put her marriage to the farmer behind her, too, for the census listed her as "D" for divorced. (1)

Radioman

Known as one of San Francisco's original Seven Hills, Telegraph Hill has been a burial ground for seamen, the location of a nineteenth-century semaphore, a destination for bohemian intellectuals, and a home for people and parrots. The hill is now topped by Pioneer Park and its Coit Tower, which offers a panoramic view of the city. Below the park, where Telegraph Hill Boulevard meets Lombard Street, you'll find a monument to Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), the father of long-distance radio transmission, also known as wireless telegraphy. South and east of Telegraph Hill, at 428 Market Street, is the former location of the Haller and Cunningham Electric Company, a manufacturer and retailer of wireless radio equipment and in operation between 1911 and 1920. In 1918, less than a month after he turned twenty-one, Volney Mathison registered for the draft in California, giving his address as 428 Market Street and his employer as Haller Electric Company. When asked his occupation, Mathison answered "Seaman." In all likelihood, he was actually the operator of a shipboard wireless telegraph or radio, the same job that would occupy him for at least the next decade.

Only twenty years before, Marconi had ushered in the era of radio communications with a series of tests and trials in Europe and the United States. On May 13, 1897, for example--only three months before Volney Mathison was born--the first ever wireless telegraph message was sent over the open seas. The distance for wireless transmissions became greater with each successive test. By 1903, even the Atlantic Ocean no longer presented a barrier to wireless messages. "Marconi's activity aroused world interest," observed The Pictorial History of Radio. "The result was that the first application for radio was established for marine telegraphy." In 1912, a young David Sarnoff made a name for himself when he received messages from the Carpathia, a ship carrying passengers rescued from the wreck of the Titanic. Somewhere out on the continent, in Alabama or Oregon or California, a teenaged Volney Mathison may very well have taken notice. He must have remembered his father's words to "read up-to-date scientific books." In any case, Mathison became a licensed wireless operator at age sixteen, only a year or two after the Titanic disaster. Like countless hobbyists all over the country, Mathison must have built his own radio sets to listen in on radio traffic and to communicate with other operators. It must have been exciting to participate in the development of a new technology and a new medium.

In 1920, the nation's first commercially licensed radio station--Pittsburgh's KDKA--began broadcasts that have continued to this day. The following year Westinghouse began offering a $60 home radio receiver to consumers. Radio stations proliferated and radio sales took off. Radio was literally in the air in the 1920s. Throughout that roaring decade, Volney Matthison worked as a radioman aboard the ships SS Robin Goodfellow and SS Greylock, plying the waters of Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, and probably California and Alaska. (2) He was a little loose with the facts when it came to his years of service, but 1918 is probably pretty close to the year he went down to the sea in ships. (3)

I have offered these details on the history of radio because knowing something about radio is important in understanding Mathison's life and work, and for two intertwined reasons. First, Volney Matthison the inventor is known for a piece of electrical equipment called the E-meter, derived from his work as a radioman and used by followers of L. Ron Hubbard from the 1950s onward. Second, Volney Matthison the author is known for writing in a new genre of literature advanced by a radio entrepreneur, a man named Hugo Gernsback, sometimes called the father of science fiction.

To Be Continued . . .

Notes
(1) I haven't found Fred Mathison in the 1910 census, but he reappeared in 1920 in Alameda, California, working as a farm laborer. In 1930, he was enumerated with his sister and brother-in-law in Oakland, California. Volney Mathison registered for the draft in California in 1918, giving his father's name as his nearest relative. In 1931, Volney gave a Berkeley address in a passenger list. I don't know when Fred Mathison died, but for a dozen years or more towards the end of his life, his son was close at hand. 
(2) For those keeping track: The SS Robin Goodfellow, a steam cargo ship built in Seattle in 1920, was torpedoed by a German U-boat on July 25, 1944, in the South Atlantic. The SS Greylock, also a steam cargo ship but built in Los Angeles in 1921, was torpedoed by a U-boat on February 3, 1943, northeast of Iceland.
(3) Like Henry George before him, Volney Matthison went to sea as a teenager. The two men also lived in San Francisco for some time during their lives, and of course both were writers. I would not say that Matthison was trying to imitate George, but it's my business here to make connections.

A postcard from Fairhope, Alabama, from the 1920s, long after Volney Mathison had departed.

The SS Robin Goodfellow, a poor reproduction of an image showing just one of the ships on which Mathison served during the 1920s.

The SS Greylock, another cargo ship, built on the West Coast and in service in the Pacific Northwest during the 1920s. Volney Mathison served on board these two ships as a radio operator. He may not have been an employee of the shipping company, rather one of a radio or wireless company. If anyone who knows about early shipboard radio operations, feel free to write.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965)-Part 1

Introduction

When I started this blog, I set out to show that pulp magazines and their authors did not exist on an island, that they were in fact part of the larger world of history and culture. Volney G. Mathison is a case in point, for his life was shaped by historical events large and small, everything from the theorizing of a now obscure nineteenth-century economist to the early twentieth-century enthusiasm for radio to mid-century religion sprung from science fiction. The putative facts on his life are curious and in some places contradictory. What you read about him on the Internet may be inaccurate, misinformed, or even maliciously fabricated. I may not have the whole story, but I think I can lay down a foundation for his biography. L. Ron Hubbard will rear his head as he has in previous blog entries. This time it will be by design and in relationship with an associate who contributed to Weird Tales magazine, the author and inventor Volney G. Mathison, also known as Dex Volney.

Origins

The story of Volney G. Mathison begins with his immigrant parents, their peregrinations, and their efforts at eking out a living in a new world. Described by his son as "a restless, intellectual, itinerant laborer of Norse descent," Fred Mathison was born in Denmark in October 1859 and came to the United States in the 1870s. By the time he showed up in the public record--in 1900--he was married and living in the Pacific Northwest, employed as a day laborer. (1) With him were his young wife, Agnes Mathison, and their two-year-old boy named Volney.

Agnes Mathison (maiden name unknown) was born in Germany in October 1877 and emigrated in the 1880s. According to Volney Mathison's later account, his mother was only sixteen when he was born. (If the 1900 census is correct, she would have been nineteen instead.) He claimed that she was from "a once-wealthy German family that had been wiped out in some Prussian war." If that's so, she had fallen far by the time her son came into the world on what he called "a poverty-stricken cotton ranch in Texas." Officially, Volney G. Mathison was born on August 13, 1897, in Paducah, Texas, a small north-Texas town, later home of the original Marlboro Man.

They lived in a dugout [Volney wrote of his family]--a hole in the ground with a sod roof over it. The mother, while carrying her baby, hoed cotton all day long, barefooted under the blazing sun. The total proceeds for this back-breaking labor for a whole year, as she computed it in advance, would be only about $65. So, as she hoed, she said frantically, savagely to herself: "I've got to get out of here! I'll DIE if I don't get out of here!"

* * *

When the baby was born [he continued], the little 96-pound mother had but scanty clothing for the infant, the sod hut was draughty, and during a January "blue norther," the temperature dropped so low the baby nearly froze to death.

Soon after her son was born, Agnes Mathison escaped the hoe and the hole to the Pacific Northwest. Nineteen hundred and the Federal census found the Mathison family in Coos County, Oregon. Volney Mathison, having survived the north-Texas winter, was then two years old. His younger sister, Eva G. Mathison, was born a couple of years later in Oregon. Eight years after that, the three of them--Agnes (then calling herself "Bertha A. Mathison"), Volney, and Eva--were living in a small town in Alabama. In a search of the 1910 census, however, Fred Mathison, comes up missing.

So what carried the Mathison family from Oregon to Alabama? And what happened to Fred Mathison? Volney Mathison's account of his parents' life on that Texas ranch offers a lead.

The evenings in the sod abode were spent mostly with the intellectual father reading aloud to the mother from the monumental political work of Henry George--"Progress and Poverty." This book undertakes scientifically to expose the fallacies of some conventional beliefs on economics. The father closed each evening with the reiterated, i.e., duplicated, comment: "You see, you can't believe much of what you hear. You must use your own eyes, read up-to-date scientific books, and always find out what is really going on. One must be wary about believing things people declare are 'eternal truths'. One must always investigate and find out the facts." [The emphasis is Mathison's. The boldface type is my own.]

Mathison's account--apparently written without any sense of irony--is a revealing one. It not only leads to the likely reason for the Mathison family's relocation to Alabama, it also implies that Mathison identified with his father through his embrace of his father's beliefs. Moreover, Mathison expressed admiration for beliefs that--for better or worse--now exist only along the fringes of economic thought. His tone suggests the voice of a crank. Whether that voice was his father's or his own is open to interpretation. In any case, Mathison lets us know that his father's words were repeated not just to his mother. Young Volney must have heard them again and again throughout his childhood.

As for Mathison's writing without a sense of irony, consider the statement:

"One must be wary about believing things people declare are 'eternal truths'. One must always investigate and find out the facts."

Volney Mathison wrote those words for the December 1956 issue of a newsletter called The Aberee, published by an organization--headed by L. Ron Hubbard--that had recently changed over from a mere belief in Dianetics to the formation of the Church of Scientology, an organization that laid claim to truth while playing fast and loose with the facts.

Volney Mathison's long quote is also revealing for its mention of the American economist and politician Henry George (1839-1897) (2). George, who died just two months after Mathison was born (3), promulgated his ideas on taxes and economics in Progress and Poverty (1879) and other books. His ideas gave rise to Georgism, one of countless economic, social, and political philosophies of the nineteenth century. I won't go into detail on George's ideas. Suffice it to say that despite the admiration of figures as diverse as Ralph Nader and William F. Buckley, Jr., Henry George's philosophy has gained little traction in the world, except, by coincidence, in Fred Mathison's native Denmark, and by no coincidence at all in the Utopian community of Fairhope, Alabama, the place where Fred Mathison's family was enumerated in the 1910 census.

To Be Continued . . .

Notes

(1) Fred Mathison may have lived in the Pacific Northwest or on the West Coast as a child or a young man, but I haven't been able to match him up with anyone in the Federal, state, or territorial censuses.
(2) Curiously, George was the grandfather of dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille and actress Peggy George. His son-in-law and his son-in-law's brother--William C. de Mille and Cecil B. de Mille respectively--were movie producers. In one way or another George was also the progenitor of the board game Monopoly. You don't have to take my word for it. You could look it up. Update (June 17, 2013): I have begun reading Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright and have found that Cecil B. de Mille's adopted son (and biological son of Cecil's brother, William C. de Mille), Richard de Mille, was an assistant to L. Ron Hubbard. The two men parted early in the history of Dianetics. Richard de Mille went on to become a psychologist, teacher, and writer.
(3) I haven't yet found Volney Mathison's middle name, but could the middle initial have stood for "George"? And what about his sister Eva's identical middle initial?

According to his granddaughter, dancer and choreographer Agnes DeMille, Henry George was in his time one of the three most famous men in America (along with Mark Twain and Thomas Edison). Today he is almost unknown, but in the 19th century, you could even buy a Henry George brand cigar, and for only a nickel. Thomas Marshall would have been pleased.

George had followers all over the world, including Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw. In America, he could have counted Fred Mathison in that group. Mathison, a Danish immigrant and hardscrabble farmer, was the father of Volney G. Mathison, radioman, inventor, and teller of weird tales.

Original text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley. Quotes by Volney G. Mathison are taken from "Hidden Drives Pick Our Jobs and Professions," from The Aberee, Dec. 1956, and are presumably in the public domain.