ure Island', had been bought by Columbia to be filmed as a fifteen-part serial for showing at Saturday morning matineés. An advertisement in the Motion Picture Herald boasted that L. Ron Hubbard, 'famous action writer, stunt pilot and world adventurer' had written an 'excitement-jammed yarn with one of the best box office titles in years'.
Ron, of course, was pleased to add the title of 'Hollywood scriptwriter' to his ever increasing roll-call of notable accomplishments and he would soon be claiming screenwriting credit for a number of successful movies, among them John Ford's classic, Stagecoach, and The Plainsman, starring Gary Cooper. Most biographies of L. Ron Hubbard describe his Hollywood career, inevitably, as a triumph: 'In 1935, L. Ron Hubbard went to Hollywood and worked under motion picture contracts as a scriptwriter of numerous films making an outstanding reputation there with many highly successful films. His work in Hollywood is still remembered.' He was also said to have salvaged the careers of both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff by writing them into scripts when they were out of work. In short, Ron became another 'Hollywood legend'.
Sadly, it appears he was an unsung legend for his name cannot be found on any 'highly successful films', with the exception of The Secret of Treasure Island. But this lack of recognition never prevented Ron from reminiscing about his golden days in Hollywood: 'I used to sit in my penthouse on Sunset Boulevard and write stories for New York and then go to my office in the studio and have my secretary tell everybody I was in conference while I caught up on my sleep because they couldn't believe anybody could write 136 scenes a day. The Screen Writers' Guild would have killed me. Their quota was eight.'
Ron did not stay long in Hollywood knocking out 136 scenes a day
7. Adventure, 10 October 1935
8. Interview with Robert Macdonald Ford, Olympia, Washington, 1 September 1986
9. Facts About L. Ron Hubbard, Flag Divisional Directive of 8 Mar 1974
10. L. Ron Hubbard autobiographical notes, 1974
11. Rocky Mountain News, 20 February 1983
and by the end of the year he was back in New York. Polly was pregnant again and mindful of what had happened with Nibs, they decided she should have the baby in a New York hospital. On Wednesday 15 January 1936, she produced a daughter, Catherine May. Unlike Nibs, Catherine was a lusty, full-term baby, perfect in every way except for a birthmark on one side of her face. Not long after she was born, the Hubbards travelled by train to visit Ron's parents in Bremerton, Washington.
Harry Ross Hubbard had been promoted to Lieutenant Commander, at the age of forty-eight, in December 1934 and the following July he was posted, for the third time, to Puget Sound Navy Yard, Bremerton, as an Assistant Supply Officer. For Ron's mother it was a particularly welcome move: her much-loved sister, Toilie, was by then also living in Bremerton and their younger sister, Midgie, lived across the bay in Seattle. May and Harry had already decided they would retire to Bremerton after he left the Navy and so they bought a small house at 1212 Gregory Way, just two blocks from the Navy Yard.
Ron's seventy-two-year-old grandmother, Ida Waterbury, was still at 'the old brick' in Helena, but in October 1935 Helena was hit by an earthquake. The first tremor was felt during one of President Roosevelt's Friday night 'fireside chats' on the radio. Throughout the following week, fifty-six further shocks were recorded, none of them serious, but at ten o'clock on the evening of 18 October a series of violent tremors shook the town, reducing many of the public buildings to rubble and generating widespread panic. 'The old brick' survived the earthquake, but in a dangerous condition. Next day, old Mrs Waterbury caught a train for Bremerton to stay with May and Hub at Gregory Way.
It was in these circumstances that Polly, Ron and their two small children were welcomed into the bosom of the Waterbury family when they arrived in Bremerton in the spring of 1936. All the Waterburys liked Polly. 