ello, my name is Joe Holesworth, and here is a little bit about myself:

     My name is Joe Holesworth. I'm age 40 with a wife and a 7 year old son. I work as a school administrator for a private boarding school in Oregon where I also teach guitar. My interests are music (obviously), reading and spending family time. I have been a Scientologist since the late '70's and have gained a great many personal benefits from studying and applying Scientology.

      I first heard about Scientology in the mid '70's while reading an interview with jazz key-boardist Chick Corea in a music magazine. He didn't elaborate about Scientology in the article, other than to say that it was helping him as an artist and with his life. I didn't think much of this and still didn't really know what Scientology was about, having never even heard the word before. I think that my response was something along the lines of, "well, good for him."

      Mainly, I was a fan of Chick Corea and was very impressed with his musicianship, skill and creativity. My musical tastes vary from "Classic Rock" to progressive jazz rock or "fusion" and some types of jazz and blues. During the seventies there was much going on in music, in spite of the Disco thing, and our culture was in a strange phase. I was a high school student and drug and alcohol use was a very common and casual thing. It almost seemed pretty much acceptable in society as this was before the days of gangs, crack cocaine and "Just Say No". It was all part of being cool and having a good time and I didn't really have a bad time of it in the party scene. One thing that I do recall though upon first getting into Chick's music and seeing his band perform on PBS, was thinking that there was no way that those guys could be getting high. This was simply due to the fact that the music was so tight, fast, complicated and still fun. Chick and his band seemed to be very relaxed and very in control. And they just burned!

      It wasn't until about 3 years after reading Chick's reference to Scientology that I saw anything more about it. I was living in the Phoenix area at the time, stationed in the US Air Force. Phoenix had a paper called "The New Times Weekly" which had all the latest club and concert news and local arts info. The local Church of Scientology had an insert in the paper one week which was a "personality test" that one would fill out and send in. Then they would contact you later to go over the results involving how you are doing in life in general. I'm not much for that sort of stuff but when I saw "Scientology" on the form, I immediately recalled that this was what Chick Corea was into. So I decided to take the test and send it in because Chick is a very successful and "together" person and I trusted his judgement based on his competence as an artist.

      I went to the Phoenix Church of Scientology and learned more about the subject and more about myself. I read some books and took some basic courses on communication, personal efficiency and ethics and integrity. I was especially impressed with some of the ethics and integrity material by Mr. Hubbard. This gave me more hope for the future of our culture and societies because Scientology is very much about being competent and having high integrity with whatever you do.