Hey Programmer Guy:
Thanks for posting all that info! I was at Riverside from around 1977 - 1979 or so. I got to poking around today wondering what ever happened to all the people I knew, and ran across the message board over at xenu, then here. Saw all your photos of the mission, and knew most of the people you mention. What a blast from the past.
Not sure if we knew each other, but here's my story. Apologies for the length, but it was a wild three years.
(I just went back and bolded the names of some of the Riverside staff that I knew.)
A high school friend brought me in when I was 16, must have been 1977. I remember Joe Yazbeck. Funny seeing his video now. Didn't he have black curly hair back then? I did the basic course, forgot what it was called, basically TRs 0-4, then Life Repair. My dad came in and talked to Jeff Kovak, my registrar, who explained that I was working through some issues from my parent's divorce, which pushed the right button in my dad perhaps, and he ponied up $1600. I remember Jeff smoking cigars. He bought his wife a fur coat. He turned me on to Herman Hesse's "Narcissus and Goldmund".
I brought my girlfriend in, but she wasn't buying it, so hooked up with girlfriend "b", brought her in, dumped girlfriend "a" (broke her heart, she was sweet, too bad). Girflriend "B" was totally into it, quit her job, and joined staff. She was hot, so they assigned her to disseminate out in the shopping malls and get guys in for the personality tests. I helped her pack her things into my pickup truck and move out of home. Her father was an Air Force Colonel and was pissed at me. She was done with high school, I wasn't. I left home anyway, and took a house with her down on Linden St. in Riverside where we rented a room to Glen Chang, and we all worked on staff. I worked down in the course area for Cathy Steiner, and took Student Hat, as I recall. I then worked down in the ethics area under Todd Carter. I think that was him. I remember he blew. Smoked pot. Then came back for a little while, then blew again. I think. It was a long time ago. In Bent's book he says Todd was a witness for the Riverside Sheriff's office.
My friends and family were wigged that I'd just left high school to join staff. I was a minor. My mom finally initiated legal action against the Church to compel me back home. It was a big deal. There were depositions, the whole shebang. Finally some woman from the Guardian's office in LA came back and told me to stop being an idiot and go back home, I was a minor.
Since my family had threatened to sue the church I was a PTS Type III, and I was out. Which was a bummer, because I wanted to be in, didn't want to face a lifetime of ostracism, and I was totally in love with this woman who was on staff.
I moved back home. My mom cried when I returned. I finished high school. I then moved back to Riverside, wormed my way back on staff, past the PST Type III stuff, and hooked back up with my girlfriend. One thing Bent doesn't really cover fully in his book is the extent of the loan falsifications that were going on around that time. I remember at one point I was assigned to take calls from the loan officers at the banks and confirm phony employment / income data on the loan apps. It was rampant. I had a little office adjacent to Tech Services and around the corner from Hamre's Registrar office on the top floor.
My girlfriend got pregnant and terminated the pregnancy. I believe this occurred with a number of the girls on staff, because Mary Corydon sat them down and had a talk with them. I don't know the details, but I believe the gist of it was that the girls on staff shouldn't be getting pregnant and having abortions (made sense), and if they were serious they should be getting married. I remember sitting in my pickup truck on Linden avenue outside our apartment late one night when my girlfriend related this to me. Then she said "I've been thinking about it and I think we should get married." I considered that for about 10 seconds, and said "OK." I was 17.
I ran the Tech Services department under Cathy Steiner for a while. I was also close to Jim Hamre. By that time my girlfriend was working as the nanny / assistant for Bobby Mondello, so I spent a lot of time over there. We broke up once, then got back together. I remember the remodel at his house, and that he was really into the Steve Miller Band.
I remember tons of old files up on the top floor at the Mission where we would dig through old files and write letters to people to get them back in. Hundreds of letters. I remember going to treasury to get paid for the week, and walking away with, like, $22 or something. So on weekends we would go out and pull tires from under mobile homes out in the Mojave desert and bring them back to the factory in Hemet to make enough money to make ends meet, so we could afford to work those 12-14 hour days the remainder of the week. You could make $500 in a day if you found a good mobile home park. We'd ignore the "No Soliciting" signs, and when we struck pay dirt, would load up my pickup truck with tires, stringing them over the hood and cab when the bed was full. You'd come back filthy from rooting around in the crawl space under those mobile homes, in all the dirt, bushes, dryer lint, and black widows. I remember Jeff Kovak, or his assistant sitting on the stairs at the Mission on Friday nights, lending cash out to people so they could go pull tires at 10% interest for a weekend. I remember the cafeteria, and nailing a bunch of wood paneling up in the gym, the old swimming pool, and the band room out back, and the old telex machine in the basement, and Mark Lutovsky in finance. I don't think the Corydons ever got rich. They drew maybe $800/week each, maybe $1000. The Registrars like Hamry and Kovak would pull in $400, $800 on a good week. As I recall 10% went back to the mother Church. Many of the staff worked for peanuts. Their choice. Scientology wasn't like other churches, where you have a minister or two, and a secretary. There were tons of people on staff. The cost structure was more like a college. I don't know what happened at other levels of the church, but at the Mission level no one was getting rich, and the numbers seemed to add up from what I saw. Weird stuff happened, but people generally believed in what they were doing.
I worked under Jim Schwartzel in the Ethics department for a while, and remember some of the wild stuff that occasionally happened there. I remember one older guy with a hot young wife who didn't want her in there. He had money. Yelling, locked doors, it got ugly. I think Jim Scwartzel left staff, because after a while I was running the Ethics Department. I think I was 18. I remember when I was running Tech Services, Glen Chang worked for me (and rented a room in my house). He taught me how to cook Chinese rice, and had these two ceramic cobras we would look at while listening to Chick Corea and Return to Forever. Heh. I remember shopping at the grocery store for food and buying lots of rice, pinto beans, bread, peanut butter, and milk, because they were cheap and you could live all week on them.
One day Glen Chang's father died, and he had to fly to Hawaii. I gave him shit about going and not coming back, believe it or not, and he told me, rightly, to go to hell. When he got there he decided to stay to help his family. I gave him shit about it ("blowing" Scientology and all). I felt bad about that for a long time afterward. I remember Cathy Steiner telling me to lighten up, his family needed him. Some people did display common sense. I remember writing letters to LRH, and having to stand up and clap after meetings. Always felt weird about that. Also every Saturday night having that Saturday Night Live skit show. Those were cool. I forget who did those, but one of those guys got into trouble for creating a radio ad over in San Bernardino impersonating the voice of John Travolta to get people into Riverside for personality tests. I remember people on RPF knocking down walls in the building across the street and cleaning bricks.
I remember my girlfriend screwing around with another staff member, driving around all night to try to find them, showing up at his house at, like, 4 am, his wife opening the door with their baby in her arms, saying she didn't know where he was either. Then they both went to Ethics. I was like "OK, cool, you worked through 'Doubt', i'm good with that," and we got married a few months later, at the Mission Inn. Cathy Steiner performed a very nice ceremony.
My wife wanted to go to Montreal for our honeymoon, so my father flew us there first class and put us up in a great hotel for a week. After three days my wife had to check in with Barney Ammons, who ran the dissemination group. They needed her back immediately because "stats were down". I wasn't to happy, she was insistent, so we cut our honeymoon short, and returned the next day. My parents wondered what the hell went wrong. I didn't tell them. I remember something similar with my brother's wedding in San Diego. My wife couldn't attend. She had to work that day to get people in for personality tests. I was unhappy about it, but I accepted her decision.
I worked for Bill Butler as his... I forget what they called it. Communicator? I ran his office affairs, and also took care of his house, which meant laundry (I remember washing his wife's underwear, which for me was kind of gross), staining furniture, and driving his Porsche. Did you know LRH had a policy on the proper way to wash a car?
Then the police raid came, on account of the fraudulent loan apps. I remember driving boxes of stuff out of the building. Everyone was in a panic. It was in the papers. People from LA Guardian's Office came in and took over to clean up the mess. I think the Mission had about 800k in reserves at that time. The fraudulent loans were paid off with that money, as I recall. I didn't know Bent or Mary well. What little I did know of Bent, he seemed like a nice guy. He talks about some of this in his book. But the true nature of what was going on with the registrars and the loan mess, I'm not so sure he really explains that fully, as I remember it.
By that time I'd bought a 3 BR house in Riverside, and was living there with my wife and three other people. Bob Parcell (I think), his wife, and Glen Chang (before he left for Hawaii). I'd bought th house from some Scientologist (public), in a deal arranged by Hamre, I think. They used the proceeds for some services, I imagine, but I don't know. We'd all work from around 9 or 10 to 11 pm or so, come home, and watch Twilight Zone while eating dinner. Then up at 8 and back to work. I remember all the other houses on the street had neat yards, but our grass was two feet high. I never had time to mow it. When our septic tank overflowed, I couldn't afford to get it pumped much less replaced. I dug a 10 ft deep trench out to the street and hooked out house into the public sewer, but never paid the city for that. I couldn't afford it. When the engine on my pickup truck died, I rebuilt it in my garage in my spare time (heh). Never having done it before, there were a couple of nuts left over, but it ran. I had no money. I remember thinking if I could only make $12,000 / year someday I would be on easy street. But I made about $35 a week. I kept trying to save money. I tried to keep a small savings account at Crocker Bank down at the end of University Ave. but could never manage to save anything.
After the police raid the Corydons were out, and as I recall there was a power struggle at Riverside. I remember Cathy Steiner and Bill Butler being at odds, and some kind of brouhaha over that. It got ugly. Church ethics policies were used to assert control and knock people out. Later when I read about the machinations within the Chinese Cultural Revolution or Stalinist Russia, it reminded me of that same vibe. Bill was upset with me for not standing up for him, as I recall, but I don't remember the details of what he was accused of or what transpired. I believe Cathy ran the Riverside Mission after that. I don't know what happened to Bill. He was a good guy.
I remember sitting on some Committee of Evidence in LA. We would meet at some guy's apartment day after day. It had this weird smell. He kept spraying Binaca in his mouth. I remember that, but I have no recollection of what the Committee of Evidence was for.
I would at times have doubts about what I was doing. "What if this is the wrong direction for me?" The idea of leaving was a lot of confront, because by then I was married to a Scientologist, and most of the people I was friends with at that time were Scientologists, and I had invested myself deeply in it, on a practical, emotional, and spiritual level. I suspect many people involved in a religion at times have that unsettling feeling of "What if this isn't right?" I thought about what I really wanted to do with my life. I was 20. I decided to remain a Scientologist, but that my family was important, myfriends were important, and my future was important. Ultimately it needed to be a means to an end for me, not an end in itself. I wanted to become an artist, go to college, something. I decided to leave staff, did so on good terms, and continued auditing and courses, since those were the things I had found beneficial.
My wife wasn't happy. She wanted to be with someone 100% committed to the cause, which to her meant on staff. She decided to divorce, refused counseling, and hooked up with her boss, Barnie Ammons, who at that same time left his wife Sue for her. Sue was a sweet woman, from what I could tell, and they had an infant child. I was heartbroken. I helped my wife move her things. I still have our divorce agreement. It was written by hand on the back of a Scientology personality test sheet. I agreed to pay her $2500 so she could buy a vending machine.
I guess what goes around comes around. I remember dumping my first very nice girlfriend because she wasn't into Scientology. Notice how I got dumped for a similar reason.
I was still living in Riverside when Carol, I forget her last name was killed on a motorcycle. She had a husband. Some friends from the Church performed the grave side services. Tom Steiner maybe? No one had ever done a funeral before, and it seemed one knew what to do. The ceremony was awkward and just lasted a few minutes. The girl's family was dismayed.
I remember driving up to the mountains the day after I left staff, to go skiing with a friend. It was snowing. I felt I had been freed from prison. Everything was beautiful. Not that I disliked the Church or was angry, I just felt free. My life was my own once again. I moved to the mountains up by Lake Arrowhead. I lived in a small cabin and did carpentry and painting. I had alienated many of my friends. My siblings, cousins, and others were happy to see me again. I hiked with my brother, learned to fly gliders with my other brother, and traveled to Africa with my father, which I never could have done if I had been staff. I come from a large Italian/Irish family, and family ties are important. I continued taking classes at Riverside in the evenings. Back in my own life, my hands would shake whenever the subject of Scientology came up.
Sue Ammons came up to the mountains once, she was single by then, with a child, and I took her into the forest and gathered a truckload of mistletoe for so she could sell it and make money for Christmas. I heard my ex and Barnie got married in her parent's Jacuzzi. I worked, applied to college, and got accepted.
Years later, around 1984 or 1985, I contacted a few people I could get hold of, just to reconnect and say hello. These were people I'd spent many hours with and had thought of as friends. I remember calling Jim Schwartzel. His family ran a garage door opener business and he went back to that after leaving staff. He had been a good friend. He was very leery about talking to me. I was just calling to say hello, and wondered what he was so afraid of. I got hold of my ex-wife. She was living in Bakersfield, having split with Barnie Ammons, with a new husband and kids. I called Cathy Steiner and we caught up. She seemed of the opinion that if I was not actively pursuing Scientology, I must be doing drugs, or failing in life. I wasn't doing drugs, but was pulling straight As on a scholarship in graduate school at MIT. Maybe not the answer she expected. I always liked her, and still did. I hadn't really rejected Scientology, I liked the auditing and courses. But I had decided to pursue my goals, to prioritize my family or friends, and to go out and live my life. The organization and the press it was getting didnt' thrill me. I'd had some difficult experiences, and some positive ones. I remembered a lot of people from Riverside fondly.
I haven't heard from or spoken to anyone from Riverside since. I ran across your photos on this board, and I thought "cool!" Just wanted to introduce myself and relate my own history with Riverside.
