often wore a paramilitary uniform and carried a Colt .45 revolver, giving
the impression of a small-town sheriff. But based on his extensive
correspondence with colleagues and a handful of accounts in the
Canadian press and books about the period,* as well as interviews with a
handful of people who knew him well, it’s possible to assemble a rough
portrait of the man, even if it does leave some important areas blurry or
blank.
Hubbard was born poor in the hills of Kentucky in either 1901 or 1902
(his FBI file gives both dates); he liked to tell people he was twelve before
he owned a pair of shoes. He never got past the third grade, but the boy
evidently had a flair for electronics. As a teenager, he invented something
called the Hubbard Energy Transformer, a new type of battery powered
by radioactivity that “could not be explained by the technology of the
day”—this according to the best account we have of his life, a well-
researched 1991 High Times article by Todd Brendan Fahey. Hubbard
sold a half interest in the patent for seventy-five thousand dollars, though
nothing ever came of the invention and Popular Science magazine once
included it in a survey of technological hoaxes. During Prohibition,
Hubbard drove a taxi in Seattle, but that appears to have been a cover: in
the trunk of his cab he kept a sophisticated ship-to-shore
communications system he used to guide bootleggers seeking to evade
the Coast Guard. Hubbard was eventually busted by the FBI and spent
eighteen months in prison on a smuggling charge.
After his release from prison the trail of Hubbard’s life becomes even
more difficult to follow, muddied by vague and contradictory accounts. In
one of them, Hubbard became involved in an undercover operation to
ship heavy armaments from San Diego to Canada and from there on to
Britain, in the years before the U.S. entered World War II, when the
nation was still officially neutral. (Scouts for the future OSS officer Allen
Dulles, impressed by Hubbard’s expertise in electronics, may or may not
have recruited him for the mission.) But when Congress began
investigating the operation, Hubbard fled to Vancouver to avoid
prosecution. There he became a Canadian citizen, founded a charter boat
business (earning him the title of Captain) and became the science
director of a uranium mining company. (According to one account,
Hubbard had something to do with supplying uranium to the Manhattan
Project.) By the age of fifty, the “barefoot boy from Kentucky” had
frankie
(Frankie)
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