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Philip Gale
The following unsigned obituary was published in today's edition
(March 18, 1998) of _The Thistle_, a left-leaning alternative newspaper at MIT.
Obituary
It was late on the evening of Friday the 13th, when Philip C. Gale entered an empty classroom on the fifteenth floor of the Green Building. Gazing out the window of the darkened room he could see the city lights shining brightly across the river and a full moon hanging low in the east over Boston harbor. Standing quietly in that dark and silent room, he made a final decision to end his life. Philip's death marks the second suicide this year by an MIT student and sixth student death. While we can never know exactly what moved Philip, we can relate some facts of his life which suggest that, at the age of nineteen, he found himself caught between two worlds and terribly alone in the center.
Philip Gale, was to most of his friends and acquaintances at MIT, an avid musician and Internet software developer. He was a member of the noted Balinese percussion group, Gamelan Galak Tika and was beginning a UROP with Media Lab researcher, Todd Machover. He had just spent a year working as director of research and development at EarthLink <http://home.earthlink.net/~pcg/>, an Internet service provider (ISP) based in Southern California, and had returned to MIT to finish his degree. He was a brother at Phi Sigma Kappa, the fraternity he rushed as a freshman in the fall of 1994. But Philip's time at MIT was a limited window of opportunity to live a life relatively unaffected and free from the influence of the Church of Scientology.
Philip C. Gale was also the son of Marie Gale and the late David Gale and brother of fifteen year-old Elizabeth Gale. He was a fourth generation Scientologist raised in Clearwater, FL, the Church's international spritual headquarters and educated at the private Delphian School <http://www.theschool.com> in Oregon. Delphian is a school founded by the followers of L. Ron Hubbard, and dedicated to teaching his philosophies. Philip's mother Marie, stated in a 1991 _St. Petersburg Times_ article on Scientology's children[1], that she decided to become an active member in the Church at the age of 12 and that her children also entered Scientology training without any pushing or prodding. Marie is now the Director of the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) in the Carolinas. CCHR, <www.cchr.org>, founded in 1969 by L. Ron Hubbard and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, is a non-profit, public benefit organization "dedicated to exposing and eradicating criminal acts and human rights abuses by psychiatry." The Gale family is quite well known in Scientology circles for their committment to the Church and is noted for their $100,000+ donation to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS).
Graduating from the Delphian School at the age of 14, Philip went to work as a software developer at EarthLink, an ISP founded by fellow Delphian alum, Sky Dayton and heavily bankrolled by Scientologists. After spending a year at EarthLink, Philip came to MIT as a freshman and perhaps for the first time, entered an environment in which the Church was rarely mentioned. He stayed at MIT only long enough to complete his freshman year, before returning to EarthLink for another _two_ years to work on software development. This was his second year at MIT and he had just begun a music degree. What caused him to stop and take his own life when everything seemed to lie ahead?
A Friend on Gale
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