Public Meeting

Dallas, Texas

December 1999

What Is the History of Dr. Stelle?

Q:     I’m one of those people who know nothing about Dr. Stelle. You have already given a great explanation to one person already. Could you tell me was there any connection to Dr. Stelle and you and the Stelle, Illinois group and TAO? Do we have anything of—

RK:   I never met Dr. Stelle. He died the year that I joined the Lemurian Fellowship. My teacher and I used to have constant tussles about, you know, “This is what we’re teaching. What we know is what we’re teaching.

Dr. Stelle was an osteopath. His office was destroyed in San Francisco when they had the great earthquake there. So he moved to Milwaukee and tried to make a living there as a writer. During the depression that was a tough way to make a living. He came up with some publishable stories and managed to have some kind of income.

Then there is a young man, who was twenty years old, who came across a manuscript. I’m not sure if you’d call it a manuscript but certainly a lot of information that had been put together by his uncle, who had died. He [Zitco] inherited this information. He found it. He wanted to profit by it in some way. Again, this was during during the depression. So, he thought he wanted to have it published as a book so he contacted several agents and finally found one in Chicago.

Dr. Stelle, by that time, was living in Chicago also. The agent said, “Well, this is pretty interesting stuff—pretty far out. It’s not a thing that I think is very saleable but maybe a writer that’s pretty good might be able to get together with you and turn it into something that would be a saleable item. It was quite a hodge-podge the way it is here. So, he put these two, this young man and Dr. Stelle, together and Stelle, from the advancement that He had personally, recognized that was a pretty interesting thing.

But He didn’t think that making a book out of it and putting it out there was as good an idea as serializing it into twelve steps. People would buy the first set and show that they understood it then they would be entitled to get the next step. So, there were twelve lessons that they put out. That’s how this whole thing began and they formed the Lemurian Fellowship in September 1936 to put forth this information as a religious organization, not a church but as a religious type organization—a philosophical organization. As time went by, the younger man, who really didn’t see eye to eye with this older man, Dr. Stelle, had other ideas about what he wanted to do and got the idea of setting up a church and pulling some bucks in, as it were, through having a church. Dr. Stelle put an end to that, so the young man said, “Well, I’m going to take my wife and leave and you’ll find that you’re here all by yourself and everybody else is going to follow me out of this group and join with me. As it turned out there was nobody that joined with them. The two of them just left and that was it. Dr. Stelle completely revised the lesson material that had been put out, made them much more understandable, wrote with heart in his presentation of the new lessons. Which, incidentally, were completed just as I learned about them and joined.

But, as I say, I didn’t get along real well with my teacher mainly because I’d say, “You’ve only got half here and here’s the other half.” And I would tell her the other half and she would say, “You’re just my husband I divorced. He was an engineer. He’d think the same way. But she got along pretty well with my wife at any rate.

When The Stelle Group was formed in Chicago, I recommended to people who became interested to become students of the Fellowship because they presented information that I was not authorized to present then. I said, “It was good background. If you studied this sort of stuff, if you mimeographed two side it came to a stack about this thick (must be motioning with his hands), you know.” I was not in a position to be writing all those kind of things so I recommended that they do that—the people who were interested in Stelle. Work to build a community in Chicago, near Chicago, and to take these lessons as disciplined instruction as basic parts of the philosophy.

That went on for maybe a year and finally the president of the Lemurian Fellowship said, “We’re going to have to put a stop to this. We’re only getting ten dollars a lesson which takes a lot of time from our teachers and what have you to do that and but all the tithes are going to you and to your community. So, we’re going to have to state that the people are either going to be members of The Stelle Group or the Lemurian Fellowship and they’re going to have to make a choice.” I’d say that about 90% of the members of The Stelle Group decided to drop the Fellowship and go with The Stelle Group. That’s when I had to get busy and do a lot more writing to get things out into (?), as it were, to our philosophy and getting greater and greater depth to it. So, I had to spend a good deal of my time writing from that point on.

Then it wasn’t too many months later, years later maybe two years at the most, the Fellowship started publishing books that were totally off-the-wall. They were looking for ways to bring in some money and they started publishing these books that were done by automatic writing, what have you. I couldn’t abide by that, in any way, shape, or form. I said, “We’re going to have to drop any connection we have with the Fellowship—any connection. So, that’s what happened.

It didn’t take very long before they completely revised all of Dr. Stelle’s versions of the lessons and reverted back to the original ones, which were extremely difficult to read and understand. They get into a lot of socialism and what have you because the guy that he got involved with was definitely a socialist.

That’s our background.

Was the Community of Stelle Named After Dr. Stelle?

Q:     Was the Stelle community named after Dr. Stelle?

RK:   Yes. Incidentally, there was a lieutenant governor in Illinois by the name of Stelle so people used to ask, “Where’d this name come from?” “Well, you know, from the old governors name.”

Q:     At a subsequent time were you authorized to disseminate that information.

RK:   Yes.

Q:     But at that time you weren’t?

RK:   Yes.

What Were the Lemurian Lessons?

Q:     In terms of the materials that Dr. Stelle and this other person were going to. They started with certain material. There were twelve lessons?

RK:   Well, they made twelve lessons out of them. They reorganized the hodge-podge of information that apparently had been put together and written down the best that you could understand it by the deceased uncle. Although the young man who brought the

Q:     There was an uncle of the other person?

RK:   Right.

Q:     And then there’s some other material which is like an economic treatise? Was that a separate?

RK:   No. That was included in the original lessons.

Q:     That was original. Okay.

RK:   Yes.

Q:     Dr. Stelle did not write any of that from scratch?

RK:   No. None of it from scratch. But he did completely revise the materials. He made it really enjoyable to read. As a person who could write good, saleable short stories He knew how people’s attention would operate and don’t go on like a dry tome forever and ever. That’s good for falling asleep at night but you’re supposed to understand what’s on the written page. And that’s where he had the skill that was really valuable. And also the good heart of the man shows through readily in there.

Where Did the Stelle Group’s Correspondence Course Material Come From?

Q:     Is that where Linda Drane got her information to write her lesson?

RK:   No. We’d used to have lectures that I would get involved with. They were just for the people in the community and a lot of people remembered that stuff. It was the kind of information that would really stick with you. Linda Guinn put those lessons together—all the Stelle lessons. I was the editor of those things. Just to make sure that she wasn’t stating anything what wouldn’t be true. Of course, it has it’s own flavor that she gave it. And again, she was a pretty nifty lady.

Q:     Where are they now? Where are those writings now?

RK:   God only knows. There may be somebody here who has some of those lessons. I don’t have copies of them.

Q:     Would they be up at Stelle?

RK:   They don’t file anything about ???

What Is Happening with Stelle?

Q:     They’re more-or-less, totally—

RK:   They’ve got a whole new religion up there and a new guru and all those kind of things.

Q:     Well, they’re not at all oriented toward technology and?

RK: Well yes, I think they are. There are a couple of people up there who managed to get some pretty interesting grants, some what have to do that.

Q:     Nothing in so far as lighter-than-air ships?

RK:   No.

Do You Know Anything About the Philadelphia Experiment?

Q:     Are you familiar with the Philadelphia Project?

RK:   The prime experiment?

Q:     Where it disappeared and …