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Moscow, seat of the University of Idaho, population 5,000, was a second-class post-office town when Doc Robinson settled there. It has jumped to first class, Psychiana having sent out more & more mail—$14,852.63 worth last year. A beginners' Psychiana course of 20 lessons costs $20, includes an examination and the right to ask Doc Robinson for personal advice. (On a typical day last week he voiced 387 replies by dictaphone, which three stenographers took down.) Advanced courses of ten and 40 lessons cost respectively $10 and $50. Sending these out keeps 60 Psychiana employes busy. The firm also markets eleven Psychiana textbooks, costing from $1.59 to $2.50— although Founder Robinson's business aids wondered last week if sales might not slump when Psychiana students form groups, share their books. Biggest Psychiana gross to date was $400,000 in 1934.
Frank Robinson says that at a visit to the White House a year ago President Roosevelt told him: "Doc, you and I are trying to do the same thing: make people think." A top-notch salesman. Doc Robinson has never forgotten how, in his behind-the-counter drugstore days, he once sold five one-gallon jugs of mineral oil to a man who came in to buy a pint. Besides its own building in Moscow, Psychiana owns three drugstores, a daily paper, the News-Review. An accomplished organist, the founder has an 800-pipe Wurlitzer in his big Moscow home, invariably includes organ solos (preferably Brahms) in his infrequent lectures. Though in those lectures Doc Robinson is inclined to blast the Christian churches, thus annoying many of his hearers, he has Christian charities at home—last year he gave a new altar to Moscow's Episcopal church. To the Christian churches Doc Robinson ascribes blame not only for attempts in the past to have his transcribed radio programs (frorrf .18 stations) put off the air, and to have the Post Office Department find something illegal about Psychiana, but also for the fact that he was indicted and tried on charges that he made false statements in attempting to obtain a U. ,S. passport. He was acquitted in 1936. Doc Robinson, who, it turned out, had simply been mistaken about his birth—he is actually a British subject—was then arrested on a deportation warrant charging him with illegal entry into the U. S. Upon intervention of Idaho's Senator Borah, who stays at the Robinson home when in Moscow, the charge was dropped. His status regularized by a trip to Cuba last summer, from which he returned on an immigration visa. Doc Robinson is currently awaiting naturalization papers.