Upon his return to the United States in late 1929, and through brief service with the award-winning 20th Marines, Ron resumed his formal education to eventually enter George Washington University where he studied engineering between other more adventurous pursuits of which we shall examine in pages to follow. But continuing with the broad strokes, as he informed readers of Adventure:

“Civil engineering seemed very handsome at the time. I met the lads in their Stetsons from Crabtown to Timbuktu and they seemed to lead a very colorful existence squinting into their transits. However, too late, I was sent up to Maine by the Geological Survey to find the lost Canadian border. Much bitten by seven kinds of insects, gummed by the muck of swamps, fed on Johnny cake and tarheel, I saw instantly that a civil engineer had to stay far too long in far too few places and so I rapidly forgot my calculus and slip stick and began to plot ways and means to avoid the continuance of my education.”

In fact, the discontinuance of his university education involved far more than mere wanderlust, and had everything to do with mainline research towards the development of Dianetics and Scientology. Then, too, with Ron’s departure from George Washington University came his first formal exploratory expeditions and all those expeditions yielded in purely material terms, including: LRH maritime notations still found in America’s National Archives from his 1932 Caribbean expedition, the British Columbian coast pilots still bearing LRH notations from his 1940 Alaskan expedition, and all else still recorded in the annals of the famed New York Explorers Club. Yet lest we get ahead of our story, let us close this introduction with a simple reminder, we are about to enter lands where “Men had to be big or fall before the unknown.”

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