Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

Barile

Well-known member
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.

I've always wanted to use that quote from Shakespeare, but never could find just the right occaision. I dunno... feels right to me.

Some of you remember me. I know Karen remembers me all too well. The grades c/s who suggested that the flu vaccine that
was being required we all take may have been tampered with and how do we know the chain of custody of that stuff, and says who?
Karen graciously appeared as a witness for my comm ev. It was I believe the late summer of 1979 that I simply announced I would be leaving.
Do what thou wilt, I said. After seven years at CCLA, 1972 to 1979, I had seen, heard, done enough. I was old enough at that point, to see the future
and experienced enough to understand the present. There were close relationships. I think most people that worked with Yvonne would have
happily take a bullet for her. In all these years since, having worked for everything from small businesses to aerospace and defense companies, to
one of the largest corporations whose product is in your pocket, I've never worked with or for a more caring individual. If you caught her
just at the right moment, she had an infectious sense of humor. It's really the little things.

I came to California on March 7, 1972. I drove from Gainesville, Florida in a 1962 Volkswagen pickup truck, with a camper shell I constructed out of
2x4's and cardboard and had sprayed with a polyfoam at the sight of a geodesic dome build. I think the guy charged me $10.00 to spray the
camper form with foam, and I simply carved it to shape.
I had taken a comm course at a small mission in Florida and ya know... the lights came on for me. I was going to California to join the SO.
I was barely 20 and was a musician by trade, so I was already used to bare minimum meals. With a false start or two, I would sign that contract.
There began the journey. I trainned on Excalibur and the Bolivar docked in Long Beach. Upon returning to CC, I was in Tech Services and later became
staff DofP. Some more training and I was doing intro sessions. As I recall, the best was Richard Kiel, 7'2" tall, played Jaws in the Bond movies.
Try to find cans that fit him.... I did some years as an HGC auditor and became "often requested". This due to the fact that I was John Travolta's first auditor.
I guess the word got out. I would go on to HGC grades c/s and was sent to Flag along with Ray Mithoff, James Fiducia and maybe one or two others.
The internships were all supervised by Brian "You What???" Livingston and c/sing courtesy of David Mayo. It was fun in the sun back in Florida, from where
I came. I spent the next few years in the CC Ivory Tower, on the night shift, as c/s'es mostly do, c/sing public grades auditing and maybe even XDN. Started doing a side job for FOLO, c/sing sec checks in my "spare time". It was at some point in there.... that I started to feel like, ya know, some of the questions were questionable. I finished OTVII and did notice a few changes. I was seeing the bigger picture. Do I attribute that to any success I had with solo auditing?
Well, no. Not now, 40 years later. Now, it's clear I knew for some time that all was not right. I had relinquished critical thought for the ideal of freedom.
I was a prisoner in a system that promised to set me free, and I was seeing all the moving parts.

When I was finally cleared for takeoff, I moved south to orange county and got some dumb jobs and went back to school. I did some professional photography for awhile, skills courtesy of Randy McDonald, who taught me the basics of darkroom work, while I "helped" him with the CC Magazine. Computers became available just a few years later. ( In fact, my first job in NYC in 1969 was with Crawdaddy! magazine, a rock magazine started by Paul Williams. The editor was Chester Anderson, a counter culture sci-fi author ( The Butterfly Kid ). He introduced me to the I Ching, DMT and Philip K. Dick, who was a friend of his, and was often found lurking around the Crawdaddy office, trying to be invisible.. They sent me to IBM school in the Wall Street district to learn IBM's new MTSC which was the forerunner to desktop publishing. It was tape driven and fairly massive. My computer career really started there, 1969 in NY, just as "Dazed and Confused" started wafting from every window in the Village. ) In 1984, I bought a Macintosh and started teaching myself programming. By 1989 I was doing overnight turnaround for all the aerospace and defense companies in the LA area. I even got to do some darkroom work, because I had the background, and did some pre-photoshop darkroom composite images for NASA.

Now here's where things go weird. I met back up with an old flame, Renee Hellstrom / Taylor / Szeckely, who was doing tax work for a dentist in my area. She was the mission holder for the Montery Mission up north. We're in 1990 if you are lost in the timeline... I knew I didn't want back in, but I thought I could show her that life had a wealth of other things to explore. I moved to Monterey and we got married. Pat Gualteri was kind enough to do the service at CC. I was able to use my contacts in LA to get an interview at Apple Computer in 1991. I was hired into component engineering and did elecro-mechanical design work. The mission was taken away from her... and she would have to close it down. I guess there was a lot of that going around at the time, but I didn't pay much attention to it really. As marriages do, this one ended shortly thereafter and she went back to LA, while I moved to Cupertino to avoid the 2 hour commute.
I would spend the next 29 years at Apple, going from hardware design, then systems engineering and have been running the production website, apple.com, and a few other smaller properties for the last 21 years of those years. This "pandemic" lockdown has given me time to consider retiring and head for the hills. So... I announced my retirement in the middle to this lockdown situation and explained that I really didn't want to retire, but if it quacks like a civil war... that was good enough for me. Decided to buy a property in a remote middle America area and go fishing, sleep late, stay up late, not have to be 'on call' and not have to try to seem interested at staff meetings. Ya, there was other stuff that happened. My kid graduated college last year and is back east doing robotics stuff. Lots of other stuff, some sweet, some bordering "strange tales". That, it would seem, is the way life evolves. Chance, luck, coincidence, kindness, and did I mention just plain dumb luck? None of the above was planned. It only makes sense when you look back at it. So I'm here and in a sense, I'm looking back, but only to hear the other stories, that I might laugh or feel empathy or catch a ray of sunshine. That's the story. I'm sticking to it.
 
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Karakorum

Ron is the source that will lead you to grief
Thanks for sharing your story. While all of it happened before my day, or when I was a kid - I do feel one very strong connection:
would spend the next 29 years at Apple, going from hardware design, then systems engineering and have been running the production website, apple.com, and a few other smaller properties for the last 21 years of those years.
Quitting Scientology and then building a life in the hard-ass corporate world? That's my life in a sentence - I can fully relate.
 

The Oracle

Not the same Oracle from a decade ago
Welcome and looking forward to more stories. Thank you for sharing.
 

Barile

Well-known member
Thanks for the welcome. Why no cooking forum? Ya know... we are not animals.
 

Karen#1

Well-known member
Warm welcome to you. :rose:
I remember our Celebrity Center days.
How fabulous that you made your computer career such a success.
High Fives to you :hattip:
 

Barile

Well-known member
Warm welcome to you. :rose:
I remember our Celebrity Center days.
How fabulous that you made your computer career such a success.
High Fives to you :hattip:
Thanks my friend. It was the ultimate testing ground in some respects.

Horatio: “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!”
Hamlet: “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
 

Karen#1

Well-known member
Thanks my friend. It was the ultimate testing ground in some respects.

Horatio: “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!”
Hamlet: “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Did you know that an old friend of ours back in those days, Hector the Reg has Passed ?
RIP Hector.



Hector Carmona, Celebrity Center Reg from years ago, RIP


Magoo
Magoo Gold Meritorious Patron


I was posting on the Memorial Thread and realized this, so
I decided to make a thread for my friend, in case people who are not posting on that thread
but knew him....will learn of his passing:

Another person many here won't know, however some may...
who passed away almost one year ago was Hector Carmona.
:omg:
He had Lung Cancer
and died on Halloween, 2012. <<< A perfect day for him to die!! He was a character
and will be missed by many, for years and years to come.

Since he didn't post here, who was he? :confused2:

He was the Registrar at Celebrity Center who "got" John Travolta
and just about every other "celebrity" onto courses and auditing "in" Scientology, from the early
days (1970's+)
He was at the original Celebrity Center down on 8th Street, and then left after
I believe 10 years or so.
:coolwink:


He resurfaced when I began having my parties after I escaped out, in 2000. Hector used to love
to come to my parties....see many of his old Celebrity Center Staff friends, and meet
new ones, too. He shall be missed, as will everyone here. I just realized I never made a thread
for him as he wasn't really a member here at ESMB. However, due to his post...quite a few
may have known him.

:bighug:
To ALL

And Hector:
:party:
ON where ever you are!!

Tory/https://www.forum.exscn.net/threads/hector-carmona-celebrity-center-reg-from-years-ago-rip.33494/Magoo
 

Barile

Well-known member
Did you know that an old friend of ours back in those days, Hector the Reg has Passed ?
RIP Hector.



Hector Carmona, Celebrity Center Reg from years ago, RIP


Magoo
Magoo Gold Meritorious Patron
I did not know. Hector was one of a kind. I have a film clip in my head of Hector and Joyce Myers dancing a tango at the old 8th Street. Pure Gold. Wish you could have seen that.
I've noticed over the years a few others...
Ingo 2013, I didn't know until 2014... when he mentioned it.
Kathy Yaude, a good friend once upon a time
Pat Gualteri
Dave Johnson
Dick Glass
perhaps others that I don't know about. It's for certain I think. Nobody gets out with their car keys.
It's like every time I used to call my mother, she'd open with, "oh ya know who else died?"
"Aunt Rosey?"
"no."
"Uncle Phil?"
"He died years ago..."
"Ma....."

Death wouldn't be so bad, if you could examine your life and decide how to do it better the next time. But then, life wouldn't be so
bad if you could do that while you were alive. Feel me?
 

Barile

Well-known member
You could start a topic thread for that in the off-topic area of this message board. :)
Maybe you have some favorite recipes to share?
I might be that guy. When CC had the hotel on Selma in Hollywood, the kitchen was at the back of the mess hall. Don't know why, but I walked into the kitchen and told the cook "I'm gonna make stuffed mushrooms for the entire crew". He said sure, go for it. So I went ahead and did my famous stuffed mushrooms with creme sauce for a table of about a hundred. Wouldn't want to have to do it every day... but I was just so sick of his cooking... in a nice way.
 

Barile

Well-known member
@Barile

Thanks.
(I was about to ask you if you were on staff at CC before or after it moved to The Manor in Hollyweird.)
In '72 the staff all lived in the Charlie Chaplin house on Westlake. I had a room in the attic. We walked from there to the 8th Street org, across Alvarado. We moved to the Selma hotel when we moved the org to the LaBrea building. Somewhere in there I married a public student, Jamie Maverick. She was staying at the Manor... and consequently, so did I. Jamie was part of my escape plan. I would protect her from her crazy x boyfriend and she would get me out of Hollywood. This, of course, was unspoken, but abundantly clear to both of us. She basically saved my life.
And for awhile, I got to be part of the Texas Maverick family. I should probably put her in my will, except last time I checked, she was living in Clearwater. Coincidence, or something else?
 
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programmer_guy

True ex-Scientologist
@Barlie

When you were a hardware design engineer (or technician?) at Apple,
what was the employee corporate culture like in your personal experiences?
 

Barile

Well-known member
@Barlie

When you were a hardware design engineer (or technician?) at Apple,
what was the employee corporate culture like in your personal experiences?
Those years were the Sculley/Spindler through Gil Amelio years. I was in Component Engineering and later moved over to PCB design engineering. That was the old Apple, the environment was highly creative and driven by the need to keep the company alive. I guess it was as optimum as you could hope for, a large company that acted like a startup. Things were much less "corporate". Beer bashes on site pretty much every friday, free perks from the projects you worked on, time flew by and we were very proud of the products. When Steve returned he definitely had a plan and had his fingers in absolutely everything. You could not go a day without bumping into him in the parking lot or at the cafeteria, or on the phone to your boss's boss about those missing images on the website. It was a little like watching old videos of Herbert VonKarajan rehearsing the Berlin Philharmonic. Every nuance needed to be as he wanted it. Things began to grow very, very quickly and stayed on that trend for years. It was not the old Apple anymore, it was not like a startup. You didn't know everybody and you had to have a firm grasp on what you were ultimately responsible for, because with more people comes more complexity. The old Apple was all about teamwork and cooperation and indeed, thinking outside the box. Creativity was valued and rewarded. This can't happen as easily after you reach a certain critical mass. The early years were the best years of my life, the most rewarding, the most challenging. When I took over website production and datacenter environments, it felt like the challenge was to protect and defend against the "forces of evil". Make no mistake, they line up at the door and take a number. Over the years it went from 10% of the job to 95% of the job. All this, I pretty much can't discuss beyond just that, but it certainly affected the culture. Now, culture exists in only small pockets, small groups. Another reason to have retired, the thrill being gone. I'm sure you know what I mean. As for Apple, invest long.
 
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