"Gooks"

L. Ron Hubbard taught English in a native school for a short time while he was on Guam as a young man. He recorded his impressions of the students in his personal diary as described in the following excerpt from Scientology's Study Technology: The Hidden Message in L. Ron Hubbard's "Study Tech" , section 2b, "Study Tech and L. Ron Hubbard: Hubbard the Educator" by Dr. David S. Touretzky and Chris Owen, MBE.

What none of the official accounts mention is that he taught at the school for just one month. According to contemporary accounts, he found it a challenge and "good experience" but one that he did not particularly want to repeat. His diary recorded his dislike of the natives of Guam, the Chamorros. He referred to them as "gooks" who were "really more or less savage at heart." He considered them more intelligent than the Filipinos, but felt that they had hardly been touched by civilization. They were far inferior to American youngsters. His diary gives only the briefest mention of his teaching "career," in the course of a paragraph discussing the remarkable effect that his flaming red hair had on the local people:

Whenever I sat down outside a doorway, the children would gather around me with a very dumb and astonished look upon their faces. The real test came when I commenced a teacher's career. The Chamarroettes would not study, they would just look at my hair.

(Hubbard, personal diary for June-July 1927)

Hubbard's dissatisfaction with the Guamese natives made itself felt in other contemporary records. When he got back to his home town of Helena, Montana, the local newspaper interviewed him about his voyage to the Far East. He described his tour of the region, on which he had been accompanied by his parents, and mentioned his time in the Guamese school:

While with my parents in Guam I taught school for about a month. It was good experience and in my opinion an adventure. The natives were none too easy to handle and I would not care to continue as a teacher there.

("Ronald Hubbard Tells of His Trip to Orient and Many Experiences", Helena newspaper, September 1927)