For the next several years thereafter, LRH appears precisely as portrayed by acclaimed editor and colleague John W. Campbell Jr.: an immensely talented, if occasional musician, “as fully as good as Bing Crosby and Lawrence Tibbet -- with an effect sort of halfway between those two.” In an especially evocative note, Campbell describes an L. Ron Hubbard performance in these terms: “He has a low, magnificently mellow baritone voice, and he ‘puts over’ a song so powerfully, that when he’s finished, there’s a very sharply noticeable pause of dead silence before anyone speaks or shifts to make small noises in the semidark.” As a further note on repertoire, Campbell correctly spoke of songs Ron had picked up, “here, there and everywhere,” including a pre-war Asiatic Fleet’s “The Armored Cruiser Squadron,” and “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest,” which, as the editor explained, may have lost something through association with the film Treasure Island, but became altogether “spine-chilling and blood-curdling when Ron sings it by firelight.”

Also from these years come accounts of Ron’s versatility on the keyboard, which he seems to have picked up between that series of lessons in Helena and ballroom pianos in Naval Station dance halls, and the night he led a rumba line on voodoo drums he had mastered through the course of Caribbean expeditions. “The amount of rhythm one can extract from a drum with hands is remarkable,” he noted, and told of a “throb and moan and wail and roll and thunder and whisper like a parade of ghosts.”

Yet regardless of how seemingly peripheral were his musical pursuits through these years, the outcome was by no means peripheral. In fact, it was just such a pursuit that would finally lead him to the central revelation of all musical creativity -- including that riveting aesthetic power that John Campbell had sensed when he wrote of the “very sharply noticeable pause of dead silence before anyone speaks or shifts to make small noises in the semidark.”