Ensifer

My name is David Stokes.

Hi.

The first contact I had with Scientology was in 1960. My mother, Dolores Stokes, got involved about 1958 via a man by the name of Red Shea. Red opened one of the earliest Scientology Centers, or franchises, in Dallas, Texas.

Red Shea and Dolores Stokes. They might as well have Been Errol Flynn and Grace Kelly.

By 1966 I had received about 200 hours of auditing, much of it co-auditing, and I had done quite a few of the old courses like the Comm Course, Objectives, and so forth. At the end of 1966 I quit High School in El Paso and moved to Dallas. My mother and brother Wally had gone to Saint Hill earlier that year. I went on staff at the Dallas Center which had been purchased by Alan C. Walters, a large man from Australia. From there I was given a job at Alan’s new Center in Saint Louis. I worked there and then went off to Saint Hill myself at the end of 1967.

At Saint Hill I did the solo course and audited R6 solo. Hubbard had moved the Clearing Course to the flagship, The Royal Scotsman, and so I went there in 1968 when it was in Valencia, Spain. I audited the CC and OT1 on board the ship. And yes, I knew exactly who David Miscavige was because the little prick was there at the time. When I attested Clear I was the 911th person to do so.

Boyce Weeks and Fred Hare. On the Royal Scotsman in Valenica. This was about February 1968 in the galley. We were preparing for a night of drinking and nefarious behavior in town.

I then returned to England and so impressed the high-rollers at Saint Hill… probably because of my charming ways and terrific good looks… that I was asked to become the Clearing Course and OT1 supervisor at Saint Hill. I agreed and did that job for several months until they wanted me to sign a contract for the newly formed Sea org. It sounded pretty suspicious to me so I declined. Alan Walters, who was back at Saint Hill at the time, paid for me to go to his newest center in Boston.

At the Boston Center fall of 1968. That's Edie Tabachnik with the puppet on her head. I tried to look older than 18 but usually couldn't pull it off.

That place was a mess. It was being run by this crazy ugly woman named Flo who was having an affair with a married guy named Pat Something-or-the-other. At least one of the other Dallas people was there for a while, a nice gal named Sandy Mehr. Flo and the Pat guy spent all their time racing around Boston is a souped-up Ford Mustang so I essentially ran the Center. When Alan sent Sandy off somewhere I was ED of the place. I was 18 years old and we kicked some ass for a while. But then I got into a power struggle with a guy named Rick Hull and, not being one for power struggles, I called Alan and told him I was outta there. I stopped off in Dallas and did a little auditing at the Richardson, Texas center (I was Class IV at the time) but since Hubbard was getting ASHO set up I decided to head out to California. I arrived there about 6 weeks after ASHO opened it’s doors across the street from the Rampart Police station.

At ASHO I became a Public Officer, then an Ethics Officer and then the Div 6 Director. It was a rocking place. Eventually I decided hustling people for phonied up success stories was a bad way to spend my time so I routed onto the SHSBC (Class VI). I ripped through that course and then did some auditing for bucks on the side, went up to Santa Barbara and did some auditing there and even donated some hours at the newly formed Narconon. Then I met a chick from Las Vegas… a showgirl no less… and off I went to the desert.

In Las Vegas I worked at the Org as a Qual auditor and then at Bruce and Danielle Harrall’s Center. Great times were had by all. My wife, the show girl, wanted to leave Vegas so we went back to LA in about 1971. I did some field auditing and she went to work as a nude dancer at the El Rancho. That was one of the first all-nude clubs in California and it was convenient to the LA Org. Lots of pretty young Scientology ladies paid for their bridges by getting nasty on the runway at the El Rancho and other nearby clubs like Monty’s. Stephanie, my wife, was a bit of a control freak and so we parted company rather than extend the struggle for 2D domination. Off I went to new York City to see the lights. I only stayed 6 weeks or so. The New York Org was pretty gross. It was filled with weird looking people in heavy clothing who all seemed to have dark circles under their eyes. Not for me.

When I returned to LA I hooked up with a nice young lady named Jana and I took a job auditing in the Center in Omaha. Man, way too much snow there. So after about 6 months we went out to Santa Clara and I  audited along with Phil Spickler,  Pete Rundberg, Alan Hollander and a few other great people. The center, (now called a Mission) was owned by Kingsly Wimbush (another one of those  Aussies) and Malcom Chemenais, a strange dude from South Africa.

By late 1972 I had moved over to Alan’s Sacramento Mission.

Alan doing Sunday Service in Sacramento, 1972-73 era. Notice there is only a picture of LRH? That's because DM was still licking boots and eating swill onboard Flag somewhere. We were making new Scientologists.

I was the ED there and we had a terrific time sweating in the rice paddies and getting folks into the Mission. One of the great families from those days was the Hendersons. Chel Henderson is now Chel Stith and last time I checked she had Heber’s old job. At least until he escapes whatever dungeon he is being held in.

Working for Alan was a huge effort. I felt like kicking his ass on a daily basis but damn, he was too big! So after popping over to Salt Lake and helping him straighten the mess out at his new Mission there I told him adios and took $2500 and Jana and went to Fresno to open my own Mission. In those days you didn’t have to pay some demanding brigade of Sea Org zombies for the privilege of helping. You just had to help… and pay your 10%, of course.

Running the Mission in Fresno was a blast. We got hundreds upon hundreds of people in and on up the old Bridge and along the way I made damned good money. So I went off to LA and did OT3. Then the Class VIII course at ASHO. Aced it too, Thanks to David Aldrich. Then back to AOLA for the auditing requirements. My mother Dolores was the C/S in Fresno and she was awesome. My wife Jana then went through a weird period of her life, left me and ended up with a fuckwit by the name of Rocky Stump. That was short-lived, thankfully, and she settled out and married a guy from Salt Lake City. I understand they are still involved in Scientology. Good on them.

As for me, I kept on doing the job I loved.  We bought and remodeled a large building and I met and married a coy young Sicilian-bred lady named Cindy. She’s now an ex-wife but is great and is the superb mother of my two older children. Cindy came along with me on at least one of my extended trips to Europe to help out the growing network of Missions there. I’m not certain she liked Europe, but she didn’t complain openly. What a trooper.

Right about 1980 the Sea org started getting extremely pushy. I had been to Flag and done the NOTS stuff and despite what everyone in the Church says about David Mayo, the auditing was just fine. But back home the pressure was on. The new Mission Office at Flag (no longer the good old Mike Davidson one at St. Hill)  was a demanding and pushy bunch of fuckers. They saw money, they smelled it like blood in the water, and they sent mission after mission after mission to my place in Fresno to get the money and demand fresh bodies to sign up for a billion years.

The turning point for me centered around a couple I had gotten on line from Bakersfield. Nice folks. Relatively affluent but not very literate. They had real study and comprehension issues and my program was for them to get their full grades and do some basic study courses. Just the ticket and they were winning in the early stages. Well, down at ASHO the Sea org ruled. The top reg was a guy named Kenny Shapiro (who had entered Scientology when I was running the Boston Center) and the CO was a gal named Irene. I think it was Irene Howie. Kenny got wind of my Bakersfield people and sent a team of reg’s there and stripped those folks for $20K. For – get this – the full Class IV training package. They told those folks that they’d save a bundle by co-auditing. Too bad they couldn’t read, huh?

I was pissed. Imagine that. I drove to LA and confronted Kenny and Irene. They pretty much told me to piss off, they had the money and that was that. What became crystal clear was that while I was all about creating new Scientologists and following the guidelines of “making the able more able”, the Sea Org was all about getting the cash and getting the bodies in the shop. The Bakersfield couple never got their co-auditing, never got trained. They burned up the $20K in review auditing and ethics cycles. Then they blew.

I decided to get farther away from the western epicenter of greed and corruption. I went up to see Kingsley in Santa Clara and told him he could buy my Mission for $25K. It was a price that I made up on the spot because how do you really value a Scientology Mission? He quickly agreed, wrote me a check for $5K and we drew up a contract for $5K every couple of months. I sold my house, grabbed the wife and kids and moved to Boise, Idaho in the middle of winter.

Here in Idaho I opened a new Mission. It was roughly March of 1982 when we got rolling. Like any new effort it was slow to start but was making good headway when I went, with my wife Cindy, to a Mission Holder’s Conference in San Francisco. What was that, October 1982? Yeah, I think so.

After the infamous Conference, where Miscavige and the RTC made their first appearance in the Field, I went home, turned the keys over to a couple here who wanted to keep the Mission going and I never looked back. I have no idea if I was declared or not. I spent at least a decade or 15 years fielding calls from Flag and old friends trying to ‘recover” me. Hell, even to this day, when my only public address is a post office box, it has no less than 6 or 7 pieces of junk mail from Scientology outfits all over the world every single day.

Now you have the short version. The long version will unfurl over the coming weeks, months and years as I add posts to the blog. I’m in no particular hurry. I’ll call things as I see (or saw) them. I’ll use actual names and won’t hedge even if the story is uncomfortable. Unless it makes me look bad… then I’ll lie like a dog.