Petey C
Silver Meritorious Patron
I joined the ex-scn forum last year and posted a very short summary of my eight years in the SO in ANZO and Flag. I was a bit irregular in my visits to ESMB but have started visiting more regularly now, and it’s time to tell more of my story. Thanks to those of you who have encouraged me. It’s now 28 years since I left, and information is now everywhere about Scientology and the SO. Since reading the posts on this site and others I have been stunned at the brutality of some of the experiences people have had and the fact that my story from so many years ago has been repeated so many times. But at the same time I’m humbled by the way you exes out there have come to grips with what happened to and around you, and the way you have worked your way through.
So here’s my story. I'll be posting it in bits.
It was 1974 and I was 23 years old and living in Sydney, Australia with my boyfriend Mike. I was an aspiring singer-songwriter and Mike was a lot of things, including manager of a live music venue and sound engineer. One rainy Sunday night in June (early winter), the two of us and our friend Chris decided we’d try this Comm Course that some other friends had been raving about. How bad could this little course be?
So the next day we trotted off to the Sydney Day org which was at Lee Street near Central Railway. It was a strange wedge-shaped building with green tiles on the outside. Inside, it was shabby, with cheap, shonky, mismatched furniture and huge pictures of this weird-looking chubby guy wearing sailing clothes all around the place. I was determined not to let appearances trouble me. I was a bit taken aback by the way everyone was so nice to us, and how they all stared without blinking. We got regged up for the Comm Course, $25 each, and went straight to the courseroom which looked decrepit, home-made and rundown like the rest of the place.
Our supervisor was Kevin McPherrin, who was to become a good friend. Kevin and his wife Linnah (and baby Moksha) were Americans, and Kevin ran a terrific course. The three of us were absolutely flipped out about the course, and we felt its positive effects on day 1. Every day we’d go off and do our TRs, and we had a ball. Every night we’d try and wade through DMSMH. Before we finished, though, John Parselle and Steve Stevens, Tours ANZO regges came to reg us for more services.
I never cared for Steve as I always thought he was a bit of a boof-head. However, I thought John was charming and charismatic. They sold us each on a small package of auditing, and I paid for mine through a loan from another Scientologist arranged by Tours. They had a good thing going: Tours sold the services introduced you to the lender, and we poor suckers paid the loan + interest. It took me years to pay off this money.
During the honeymoon period we were invited to lots of different events, including the release of the Apollo All-Stars album. The three of us were all in the music business and I think the Lee St people plus the SO guys from the FOLO were all keen to see us be really, really impressed. But really impressed we were not, it was just not our sort of music. In fact, I got sent to Ethics for snickering during the record play and referring to “Commodore Cody and His Lost Planet”. That was when I was introduced to the theory of J&D.
Over the next few months, John Parselle tried mightily to recruit us into the SO and eventually succeeded. The idea was that we three would be the beginnings of the ANZO Celebrity Centre, and we would be full SO members but still live at our own place and start getting Australian musos into Scientology.
As if. What did happen was that we moved into FOLO ANZO at 24 Dick Street, Henley, for our EPF training. If the Lee Street org was a bit of a downmarket surprise, FLANZO was a real ripsnorter. No-one could have called the three of us rich as we were just barely making it, but the FOLO looked like a hovel to me. The house was a crumbling Victorian mansion, a shadow of its former self, and crammed with people and their tatty furniture.
In fact I observed later that the FOLO was largely furnished through hard rubbish collections (where householders leave their bits of crap outside their houses twice a year and the city trash collectors come and collect it). At FLANZO, the SO got there before the trash collectors and lugged home bits of broken desks, rickety bed frames, backless chairs, etc. All this new furniture – so exciting! (But seriously, how else were they going to supply themselves. Only Tours, and by extension the Stevens clan, had any money.)
Chris could not stand the whole business of living in such degraded conditions with 50 or 60 strangers, sharing a smelly dorm room with other boys and men, and living to such a regimented schedule. He left almost immediately, returned to do his conditions and remained onlines as public. Mike and I stayed on in the SO, trying to ignore the conditions and keep our eye on the purpose. Our room was in the tower, 10 feet by 10 feet, and we had a rubber mattress we unrolled at night to sleep on. Our pay at the time was laughable, under $10 a week – when we got paid, of course.
After my basic training, I was given the post of A/CS-6. Mike built us a shared desk in his usual deft and competent way, so at least we had a decent workspace.
The CO was Chris Stevens, and her husband Norman Herring was the Supercargo. Albert Megraw was FR, and Naomi Megraw the LRH Comm. One thing Mike and I found very hard to bear was the constant screaming – Chris Stevens was a shrieker, and she used to pump herself up by playing Neil Diamond very loud, all the while screaming “Who’s on lines?!” at the top of her lungs. It was all excruciating, like being permanently tied to a boisterous head prefect, and even harder was trying to act like a good sport about it all.
The food was also extraordinarily bad, and this was even before the long runs of beans and rice (oops, joke not intended). Basically, it was pap and mush and we longed for the wonderful diverse food we used to eat. Mike must have had some money – I spent all of mine paying for my auditing – and we ate out whenever we could, but the money soon ran out.
We tried to leave a couple of times. Once Mike and I got as far as packing the car, borrowing $20 for gas money so we could drive to my mother’s house 200 kms away, and waiting for dinnertime when we would make our getaway. Chris Stevens came after me, separated us, and screamed at me so loudly that my ears rang. She told me I was a coward, good for nothing, never did anything decent in my whole life, never would, couldn’t stick to anything, was a worthless piece of shit and always would be. She screamed so hard and long that I was just weeping with terror. In the end we both stayed, did our formulas and more or less got used to our lives. We split up shortly after this and I moved into the girls’ dorm (3.5 on a scale of 10 as compared to 1.5 for the men’s dorm). Sydney is not a cold place, but because there wasn’t any heating and certainly not enough bedding, I used to sleep with a large down cushion (made by my sister) balanced on my tummy.
Mike remained in the SO, eventually going to Int or whatever they call it now. He died in the RPF, I think, in February of 2009, with lung cancer that to my knowledge was not properly treated though one lung was removed. RIP, Mike. Like all of us, he had his flaws. But he was a good man, kind and generous and loving to me and I’m sorry he went before I could say that to him.
More later.
So here’s my story. I'll be posting it in bits.
It was 1974 and I was 23 years old and living in Sydney, Australia with my boyfriend Mike. I was an aspiring singer-songwriter and Mike was a lot of things, including manager of a live music venue and sound engineer. One rainy Sunday night in June (early winter), the two of us and our friend Chris decided we’d try this Comm Course that some other friends had been raving about. How bad could this little course be?
So the next day we trotted off to the Sydney Day org which was at Lee Street near Central Railway. It was a strange wedge-shaped building with green tiles on the outside. Inside, it was shabby, with cheap, shonky, mismatched furniture and huge pictures of this weird-looking chubby guy wearing sailing clothes all around the place. I was determined not to let appearances trouble me. I was a bit taken aback by the way everyone was so nice to us, and how they all stared without blinking. We got regged up for the Comm Course, $25 each, and went straight to the courseroom which looked decrepit, home-made and rundown like the rest of the place.
Our supervisor was Kevin McPherrin, who was to become a good friend. Kevin and his wife Linnah (and baby Moksha) were Americans, and Kevin ran a terrific course. The three of us were absolutely flipped out about the course, and we felt its positive effects on day 1. Every day we’d go off and do our TRs, and we had a ball. Every night we’d try and wade through DMSMH. Before we finished, though, John Parselle and Steve Stevens, Tours ANZO regges came to reg us for more services.
I never cared for Steve as I always thought he was a bit of a boof-head. However, I thought John was charming and charismatic. They sold us each on a small package of auditing, and I paid for mine through a loan from another Scientologist arranged by Tours. They had a good thing going: Tours sold the services introduced you to the lender, and we poor suckers paid the loan + interest. It took me years to pay off this money.
During the honeymoon period we were invited to lots of different events, including the release of the Apollo All-Stars album. The three of us were all in the music business and I think the Lee St people plus the SO guys from the FOLO were all keen to see us be really, really impressed. But really impressed we were not, it was just not our sort of music. In fact, I got sent to Ethics for snickering during the record play and referring to “Commodore Cody and His Lost Planet”. That was when I was introduced to the theory of J&D.
Over the next few months, John Parselle tried mightily to recruit us into the SO and eventually succeeded. The idea was that we three would be the beginnings of the ANZO Celebrity Centre, and we would be full SO members but still live at our own place and start getting Australian musos into Scientology.
As if. What did happen was that we moved into FOLO ANZO at 24 Dick Street, Henley, for our EPF training. If the Lee Street org was a bit of a downmarket surprise, FLANZO was a real ripsnorter. No-one could have called the three of us rich as we were just barely making it, but the FOLO looked like a hovel to me. The house was a crumbling Victorian mansion, a shadow of its former self, and crammed with people and their tatty furniture.
In fact I observed later that the FOLO was largely furnished through hard rubbish collections (where householders leave their bits of crap outside their houses twice a year and the city trash collectors come and collect it). At FLANZO, the SO got there before the trash collectors and lugged home bits of broken desks, rickety bed frames, backless chairs, etc. All this new furniture – so exciting! (But seriously, how else were they going to supply themselves. Only Tours, and by extension the Stevens clan, had any money.)
Chris could not stand the whole business of living in such degraded conditions with 50 or 60 strangers, sharing a smelly dorm room with other boys and men, and living to such a regimented schedule. He left almost immediately, returned to do his conditions and remained onlines as public. Mike and I stayed on in the SO, trying to ignore the conditions and keep our eye on the purpose. Our room was in the tower, 10 feet by 10 feet, and we had a rubber mattress we unrolled at night to sleep on. Our pay at the time was laughable, under $10 a week – when we got paid, of course.
After my basic training, I was given the post of A/CS-6. Mike built us a shared desk in his usual deft and competent way, so at least we had a decent workspace.
The CO was Chris Stevens, and her husband Norman Herring was the Supercargo. Albert Megraw was FR, and Naomi Megraw the LRH Comm. One thing Mike and I found very hard to bear was the constant screaming – Chris Stevens was a shrieker, and she used to pump herself up by playing Neil Diamond very loud, all the while screaming “Who’s on lines?!” at the top of her lungs. It was all excruciating, like being permanently tied to a boisterous head prefect, and even harder was trying to act like a good sport about it all.
The food was also extraordinarily bad, and this was even before the long runs of beans and rice (oops, joke not intended). Basically, it was pap and mush and we longed for the wonderful diverse food we used to eat. Mike must have had some money – I spent all of mine paying for my auditing – and we ate out whenever we could, but the money soon ran out.
We tried to leave a couple of times. Once Mike and I got as far as packing the car, borrowing $20 for gas money so we could drive to my mother’s house 200 kms away, and waiting for dinnertime when we would make our getaway. Chris Stevens came after me, separated us, and screamed at me so loudly that my ears rang. She told me I was a coward, good for nothing, never did anything decent in my whole life, never would, couldn’t stick to anything, was a worthless piece of shit and always would be. She screamed so hard and long that I was just weeping with terror. In the end we both stayed, did our formulas and more or less got used to our lives. We split up shortly after this and I moved into the girls’ dorm (3.5 on a scale of 10 as compared to 1.5 for the men’s dorm). Sydney is not a cold place, but because there wasn’t any heating and certainly not enough bedding, I used to sleep with a large down cushion (made by my sister) balanced on my tummy.
Mike remained in the SO, eventually going to Int or whatever they call it now. He died in the RPF, I think, in February of 2009, with lung cancer that to my knowledge was not properly treated though one lung was removed. RIP, Mike. Like all of us, he had his flaws. But he was a good man, kind and generous and loving to me and I’m sorry he went before I could say that to him.
More later.
