Profile of Clyde Allen Emshwiller

[Lautremont]

Profile of Clyde Allen Emshwiller

a.k.a. “Eagles Breath,” a.k.a. “Patriots Blood,” a.k.a. “Weep-O-Crat Hunter,” a.k.a. “Christs Eagle.”


(This profile is being distributed to all online message boards and other websites to which the late Clyde Allen Emshwiller is known to have contributed under one or another of his various Internet aliases. The Council feels some explanation is owed those whom Mr. Emshwiller might have bothered, confused or harassed over the past sixteen months. The facts related below have been gleaned from public and private records, testimony from those involved, and extensive interviews with Mr. Emshwiller himself, conducted by consulting psychologists at the Selkirk Mental Health Centre in Manitoba, Canada. This is an unofficial report provided unofficially and outside scheduled hours, and intended only as a courtesy to the curious or concerned.)


Clyde Allen Emshwiller was born in 1924 to Mr. and Mrs. Viner Emshwiller of Drasco, Arkansas, United States. The devoutly religious Emshwillers kept a small and unprofitable dirt farm just outside of Drasco, and here Clyde Emshwiller grew to adulthood. Little is known about his childhood, though Mr. Emshwiller has described it in terms that might best be summarized as tumultuous, abusive and unpleasant.

At the beginning of America’s involvement in World War II, Mr. Emshwiller was of draft age, but was classified as 4F by his local recruitment office. At around this time, his behaviour increasingly erratic and violent, Viner Emshwiller was committed by his wife to the care of state officials. Clyde Emshwiller’s reaction to this was dramatic, but difficult to interpret. According contemporaneous police reports, and to Mr. Emshwiller himself, he drove the family tractor to Drasco’s main street, removed his overalls and lay in the middle of the road until being forcibly removed by authorities.

This was the beginning of an eccentric and anti-social career. Mr. Emshwiller passed several days in the custody of the Cleburne County Sheriff’s Office, and from there hitchhiked to nearby Searcy, Arkansas, in a bid to enrol in Harding College. This institution was an ideal fit for Mr. Emshwiller’s developing political and social disposition, he believed: piety, obedience, asceticism and chastity were its watchwords, and continued to be until the end of his life.

Mr. Emshwiller’s application to Harding was rejected out of hand. It is difficult to determine exactly why, as, according to records, his grade school performance was adequate. However, in light of subsequent events, it may be assumed that Mr. Emshwiller’s rejection was due to personality-related issues.

Stung by his failure, and feeling unwilling and unable to return home, Mr. Emshwiller ensconced himself in the basement of the Harding College administration building. Hiding from staff and custodial personnel, Mr. Emshwiller lived in the lower halls of the institution completely undetected for the entire 1942-43 academic year. In the spring of 1943 he was discovered and arrested. He was also linked to several theretofore unsolved peeping-tom complaints that had been registered in recent months by residents of both the female and male dormitories.

Upon his release from prison some three months later, Mr. Emshwiller again attempted to register as a student at Harding College. He was again rejected, but this time a deal was struck: Mr. Emshwiller would receive room and board from the college and in return would toil as a custodian. Mr. Emshwiller readily agreed, and returned to his old digs in the basement of the administration building. Mr. Emshwiller’s performance and conduct was apparently satisfactory to the Harding administration, and so, despite an increasing number of peeper and prowler complaints by residents and the discovery of a crude peephole in the Bison football team shower room wall (all of which were traced at least circumstantially to Mr. Emshwiller), the arrangement was maintained for almost ten years.

In 1953, a member of the Harding Bisons football team accused Mr. Emswiller of forcible confinement and rectal assault. According to school legend, Dr. George S. Benson, president of Harding College, personally escorted Mr. Emshwiller from the grounds and declared him permanently banished from the premises.

There followed a dozen years of transience for Mr. Emshwiller. He travelled through the South, taking temporary work where he could and sleeping in culverts, bus station lockers and hay lofts. Already bitter and xenophobic, he readily took up with members and would-be members of the various white-supremacist groups common to the area. Mr. Emshwiller claims to have been present in Oxford, Mississippi, during the civil-rights crisis of 1961, and boasted of hitting a federal marshal in the head with a brick.

In 1965, Dr. Benson of Oxford retired from academic life. He was replaced by Dr. Clifton L. Ganus. Learning this, Mr. Emshwiller made his way back to Searcy and once again applied at the school, this time as a mature student. For the third time his application was denied, and, gaining an audience with Dr. Ganus, he proposed the same deal he had enjoyed under Dr. Benson. Dr. Ganus, knowing nothing of Emshwiller’s past record of misconduct, agreed, and Mr. Emshwiller once again took up residence in the basement of the administrative building. Complaints of harassment and aggressive pederasty soon followed, but no action against Mr. Emshwiller was taken.

In 1966, at the age of 42, Mr. Emshwiller again volunteered for service in the U.S. Army. He was again turned away, as much for his unbalanced conduct and racially insensitive commentary during the interview as for his advanced age and criminal record.

Mr. Emshwiller’s next twenty-five years were spent in the basements of various Harding buildings. Complaints about his conduct were many and constant, but his position was never revoked and legal trouble was somehow avoided. As far as is known, he never collected a penny from the school, receiving his payment only in the form of room and board. Consequently, when informed in 1991 that his services were no longer required, Mr. Emshwiller found himself alone in the world without a penny to his name.

He returned to his wandering life, becoming known through the South as an angry, violence-prone transient. He avoided larger centres, but was the terror of homeless youth and male prostitutes in small and medium-sized cities from Texas east to the Atlantic Ocean, and as far north as the Ohio River. He spent a good deal of his time incarcerated for one offence or another.

In late 1992, angry at the election of Democratic President Bill Clinton, Emshwiller went on a rampage of alcohol- and rage-fuelled debauchery that left six men raped. He was arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He was released after serving ten.

Emshwiller returned to Harding College (now University) and pleaded for his old job as an unpaid handyman/janitor. He was rebuffed and threatened with arrest. He fled the college, and over the next six days, twenty-six rapes or rape attempts, all on men, were reported in the area. Mr. Emshwiller denied any involvement in these crimes.

According to his testimony, Mr. Emshwiller wandered the highways and eventually crawled into the back of a large truck carrying either potatoes, beets or yams. He buried himself within this cargo and survived for several days by eating the raw legumes and praying. When he emerged, he was in a place he did not recognize. This proved to be the town of Kenora, in Northern Ontario, Canada.

Mr. Emshwiller registered at the Kenora Hotel under the name “Michelob.” He then took to the streets, bringing local alcoholics up to his room one at a time on the pretence that he was holding a “beer party.” At least some of these men later complained to police of sexual assault at the hands of Mr. Emshwiller. But by this time he had fled Kenora, running out on his hotel bill and a number of other debts he had accrued during his short stay.

Neither official records nor Mr. Emshwiller himself are able to shed light on how he spent the next several years. Mr. Emshwiller does report that he developed an obsession with the Lord of the Rings series of films, watching them wherever and whenever he was able. It was this infatuation which led directly to Mr. Emshwiller’s final breakdown, which occurred in the town of Gimli, Manitoba, on 17 April, 2005.

It was on this day, Mr. Emshwiller reports, that he was informed, or overheard, that several of the characters in the Lord of the Rings films were played by homosexual actors, including the important character of Gandalf. As on that long-ago day in 1942, Mr. Emshwiller responded by removing his overalls and laying down in the middle of the town’s main street, repeating the words “Gandalf is a gay” over and over again.

He was removed by several officers from the local RCMP detachment, who remitted him to the care of provincial mental health officials. Mr. Emshwiller became a patient at the Selkirk Mental Health Centre on 4 May, 2005.

Over the next year, Mr. Emshwiller regained a degree of lucidity, and was apparently no longer concerned with the sexuality of actors in fantasy films. This was replaced with other celebrity obsessions. He was taught to use a computer. The behaviour of well-known entertainers such as Robert Goulet, Omar Sharif, Bob Dylan and Matthew Perry became of paramount concern to Mr. Emshwiller. Unbeknownst to staff, he began involving himself in the message boards of a number of right-wing websites, participating in their discussions under a number of different aliases and using them as a forum to rail against the entertainers he had targeted.

On 28 December 2006, Mr. Emshwiller passed away, leaving no known next-of-kin.