Clouser, from Fate 1.3 (Fall 1948).
Never seemingly the writer he wanted to be, but nonetheless a Fortean.
Frank Frederick Clouser was born 29 March 1909 in New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania. His mother was the former Mary C. Zerfing, his father Harry A. Clouser. Harry was in the lumber business and also a traveling locomotive inspector for the General Equipment Company of New York. Likely it was because of his itinerant work schedule that Mary and Frank lived with her parents, Peter Zerfing and Amanda (Kost) Zerfing in Center, Pennsylvania. By 1910, Peter had retired from farming, owning his home free and clear. He was 65, Amanda 54. They were still there in 1920, along with another of Peter’s grandsons, the 22 year-old Neil Floerchinger.
Shortly after the census, Harry became ill with what was called anemia. He was sick for some 18 months before dying 13 November 1922, aged 51. Frederick—as he was going by then—was his only child. He was thirteen (although the Harrisburg Evening News reported him as 14). I do not know anything more definitive about Clousers childhood. Presumably, he attended local schools, though he may also have gone to high school on Bethlehem. His grandmother, Amanda, died in September 1929. The 1930 census has only Peter, Mary, and Frederick living together in Peter’s house. None of the family members listed a job. F. Frederick, as he was called here—and would call himself professionally—was 21.
Frank Frederick Clouser was born 29 March 1909 in New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania. His mother was the former Mary C. Zerfing, his father Harry A. Clouser. Harry was in the lumber business and also a traveling locomotive inspector for the General Equipment Company of New York. Likely it was because of his itinerant work schedule that Mary and Frank lived with her parents, Peter Zerfing and Amanda (Kost) Zerfing in Center, Pennsylvania. By 1910, Peter had retired from farming, owning his home free and clear. He was 65, Amanda 54. They were still there in 1920, along with another of Peter’s grandsons, the 22 year-old Neil Floerchinger.
Shortly after the census, Harry became ill with what was called anemia. He was sick for some 18 months before dying 13 November 1922, aged 51. Frederick—as he was going by then—was his only child. He was thirteen (although the Harrisburg Evening News reported him as 14). I do not know anything more definitive about Clousers childhood. Presumably, he attended local schools, though he may also have gone to high school on Bethlehem. His grandmother, Amanda, died in September 1929. The 1930 census has only Peter, Mary, and Frederick living together in Peter’s house. None of the family members listed a job. F. Frederick, as he was called here—and would call himself professionally—was 21.
Apparently, he had literary ambitions. In 1936, he published a poem, Requiescat, a lyrical piece that showed a deft touch:
Her grave lies high where wind and sun
Can play without frustration; And lads and maids when work is done
Stroll by in youth's elation.
But we to wind and sun are veiled
And droop at times with yearning;
Nor catch young voices bravely hailed
To life with quick discerning. We grieve that death in her must be,
Yet who is blessed, she or we?
But he also made concessions to the obvious and clerked for the state’s department of highways in the engineering section, where it seems he worked for the rest of his life. (He seems to have done statistical work, at one point calling himself a “traffic computer,” before that word became associated with the electronic machines we know today; in 1967, he was with the traffic volume unit.) He continued to live with his mother and grandfather, which would have allowed him to save some money. In 1940, he was making a respectable $1,500 a year, with only a high school education. (His grandfather was 95.) He enlisted as a private in the army on 20 March 1942, and served throughout the rest of World War II, part of that time—April 1944 to November 1945—in Europe, helping to re-establish order. He left the service that later month as a technical sergeant.
At some point in the 1950s—probably around August 1957—he married Larue Jennie Weirich. She had been born Larue Jennie Miller before being married, and had a son named Thomas. I do not know what happened with her first husband, whether they were divorced or he died. Thomas would have been around 15 at the time, near the age Clouser was when he lost his own father. In 1961, Mary passed away, leaving Clouser bereft of the family with which he had grown up. He and LaRue—married when he was in his late 40s, she in her late 30s—never had children of their own. They made good money, though, Clouser pulling in some $9,000 per year, his wife half of that, also working for the same department. (That’s about $100,000 in today’s moneys.)
In the early 1960s, the family became involved in a mini-scandal related to Pennsylvania government (which is how I know their salaries.) Supposedly, LaRue chafed under the supervision of one particular boss to whom she had been re-assigned; she was offered a different position, refused, and was fired for insubordination. At least, that was the state’s case. Clouser insisted that the problem was the new head of the highway department, a Republican who nonetheless insisted that employees go to a $100-per-plate Democratic fundraiser (featuring JFK). LaRue, he said, was fired for refusing. The brouhaha made the Associated Press; there were hearings on the state level; but I do not know if the decision was ever reversed.
During this time, Clouser was apparently also writing; his favorite subject seems to have been the paranormal, and he kept notebooks with clippings on various outré subjects, such as Roger Bacon’s hidden secrets and new sources of energy. While there are reports that he wrote many popular articles, I have found only one, in addition to the poem. I have also seen reference to a letter that he wrote to the Journal of Paraspychology—put out by J.B. Rhine’s group at Duke University—but not the letter itself. In one biographical fragment, he said he was a member of the American Society for Psychical Research (which actually was at odds with Rhine, who offered naturalistic explanations as opposed to the Society’s more spiritualistic ones).
Clouser died 2 May 1986, aged 77. LaRue outlived him by two decades, passing away 19 April 2006, aged 85.
************************
I only have evidence of Clouser’s Fortean interests from the late 1940s—like many other Forteans, he did not seem to cross the decadal line. (Was there some cosmic symmetry between the name Fort and the decade of the forties?) Indeed, everything is from 1948 or 1949. But for someone whose Fortean activities seem so restricted (they could have continued privately, of course), we do know a fair amount Clouser’s thinking. He seems to have belonged to that class of Forteans who thought that Fort had generated real knowledge, which should be investigated by scientists and, eventually, allowed into the book of scientific knowledge. Which is to say he did not belong to the group of Forteans who saw Fort as undermining scientific knowledge, nor to those—Theosophists, mainly but not entirely—who saw Fort as contributing to some form of knowledge greater than science. His own contributions were to add to the heap of “damned” data and to speculate on possible explanations for pieces of it. We do not know, though, how Clouser discovered Fort or the Fortean Society. Certainly, some one with predilections toward the paranormal and parapsychology would likely have come across the name at some point.
His first appearance in Doubt—and the first indication of his Forteanism—came in issue 21 (June 1948). Thayer printed (part of?) a letter Clouser had sent. It was a hypothesis for the action of maternal impressions—that is to say, how a mother’s mood might physically manifest itself on the baby in her womb. There had been a long tradition of such thought, though it had fallen out of favor as embryologists showed there was no nervous connection between mother and baby. Clouser wanted to save the phenomena and explain it with the kind of “wild talents” that Rhine studied and Clouser thought were not so much wild as latent in the human body. He wrote,
“The prevalence of ‘old wives’ tales’ alleging instances where mothers have ‘marked’ their babies seems to me sufficiently challenging to warrant investigations, in spite of the dictum of embryologists not he subject.
“Summarily to reject such cases in toto as deliberate falsifications or benighted delusions, on the ground that no neural connection exists between mother and embryo or foetus, seems comparable with the not-so-old orthodoxy regarding meteorites: that no stones being in the sky, stones do not, therefore, fall from the sky.
“I think there is a possibility that birthmark is psychosomatically induced in the embryo or foetus, the condition being ‘triggered’ by telepathic projection of mental state from the mother.”
As “prima facie” evidence for this speculation, he pointed to the psychometric telepathy experiments of Dr. J. Hettinger and the work of Upton Sinclair and his wife on “mental radio.” He noted in particular that the Sinclairs had shown that emotions could be passed from tester to testee. He then laid out his hypothesis, claiming that in light of the likelihood of telepathic powers being present in human, and the undeniable fact that they were present in animals—it was the only explanation for what he called “mass mind”; I am not sure what that is—then it made sense that the embryo, as it ontogenically recapitulated phylogenetic history (that is to say, as the embryo traversed evolutionary history, from fish to reptile to mammal), it would enter a stage in which it was especially susceptible to telepathic forces.
Clouser submitted his idea to Dr. Gardner Murphy, of the University of California and a member of the ASPR, who thought it perfectly amenable to scientific investigation. Clouser himself hoped an obstetrician at a large hospital would take up the matter. The problem could be solved statistically, he thought, keeping records on maternal moods and birthmarks. The only issue he could see was that mothers might become scared, but tactful questioning could obviate that objection. Evidently, Clouser was proud of his idea, and touted it in Fate magazine later that year, claiming himself to have “formulated the hypothesis of birthmark causation by telepathic projection of mother’s mental state to the foetus or embryo.” As far as I know, though, he never got the experiments done.
Four issues later—Doubt 25, summer 1949—Clouser appeared for his second time in the magazine, this time another (excerpted?) letter. He wrote, “Rummaging through one of my old notebooks recently, I ran across two clippings, copies of which are attached, recounting a story of the translation of some double-cipher manuscripts attributed to Roger Bacon, were said to anticipate the telescope, the microscope, speculations and discoveries in astronomy of the time of Kepler . . .” He continued with other possible breakthroughs Bacon may have made, these in biology and the production of energy, then closed wondering why scientists would have ignored and forgotten Bacon’s contributions. This musing was accompanied by two enclosures, one from “The Youth’s Companion,” dated 1921 and the other from the same magazine in 1927. These revealed that the ciphered documents were the so-called Voynich manuscript—a still undecided work—and its supposed decipherment by the University of Pennsylvania’s W. Romaine Newbold. “If the manuscripts are even to a degree what they were cracked up to be, the matter is definitely of Fortean interest,” Clouser said.
His final appearance in Doubt came in the next issue (26, dated October 1949). In some ways it built on his previous note, though the exact line of his thought is hard to follow, probably because of the way Thayer edited the letters. In regards to the supposed Bacon manuscript, Clouser had wondered if Bacon had already discovered the so-called “miracle motor” of J. W. Keely, which had been mentioned in Fort’s “Wild Talents,” among other places. It seems that Clouser had followed out this thread, continuing to investigate Keely, and coming to the conclusion that he was a fraud, based on recent articles in Science Digest and The Northwestern Engineer. These showed that Keely had run his machine on a hidden high-pressure hydraulic system. That Clouser was willing to abandon Keely based on scientific investigation reiterates the class of Forteans to which he belonged.
In between these appearances, Clouser had his greatest contribution to the Fortean cause. Only recently, Ray Palmer, the science fiction writer and editor, had been forced out at Amazing Stories because his “Shaver Mystery” had so upset science fiction fans. He went on to co-found Fate magazine, where he was more free to indulge in paranormal speculation. (He wrote here under the name Robert N. Webster.) Fate magazine obviously overlapped with Forteanism, and Thayer noted its coming into being. In the third issue, dated fall 1948, that connection was made explicit, with Clouser writing an article on Charles Fort. The British Fanzine “Fantasy Review,” noted, “Fate, which promises to appear bimonthly henceforth, and vigorously denies a competitor's assertion that it is an ‘occult’ magazine, continues to interest fantasistes generally. In the third (Fall, '48) issue, Charles Fort gets yet another write-up by Frederick Clouser, who calls him the "Apostle of the Impossible.”
The article started with what had been Fate’s first and favorite story, flying saucers, linking them to Fort’s writing, then moving on the consider his industry and rescue him from being dismissed as a crank. There was biographical information, a description of his writing style and personal style. Clouser contrasted him with Ripley and other writers of a similar tact by looking at Fort’s investigation of falling frogs. The believe-it-or-not camp accepted the proposition that such animal rains were caused by cyclones, but Fort asked why the rains should include only a single species, why they should occur where they did? “Like a dog with a bone, he worries his subject,” Clouser noted. After touching on the founding of the Fortean Society—and before returning to it as continuing his work of forever questioning easy answers—Clouser listed a few other anomalies, as though he were continuing Fort’s work—as R. DeWitt Miller did, as Vincent Gaddis (who also wrote for this issue) did, as Donald Whitacre did and Vol Molesworth hoped to do.
Clouser wondered what could account for the migration and directional ability of birds. He mused over the claim that the pyramids of Gaza stood at the central point of the world’s land mass. He mentioned a series of mysterious fires in Indiana. He asked readers to consider dreams that came true. (In the attached biography, he mentioned this theory of maternal impressions.) “There is more in heaven and earth than we are wont to dream of in our little system of knowledge,” he said, playing off of Shakespeare. “We live in a strange and awful universe.” But these were facts, not mere delusions, and, like Fort, he cited sources for them all, experiments by H. L. Yearly at Penn State on birds’s directional abilities; a 1937 article from the Harrisburg Telegraph on the placement of Egyptian pyramids (part of a series called “Strange As It Seems”); and an insurance advertisement from Collier’s (where Miller’s articles appeared).
One wonders that Clouser did not supply the Fortean Society with a whole host of material. He seems to have had a large collection of clippings, which he kept organized and updated. Perhaps he reserved them for himself, to form the basis of his own speculations—thus what appeared in Doubt were letters, not credits for clippings. Perhaps he did send them in, and they did not appear. Perhaps he lost interest in Forteana soon after joining the Society, moved by other matters. Perhaps Thayer was not keen on Clouser, and so did little to highlight his work.
There is some evidence for the last perhaps. Donald Bloch seems to have commended the Fate article to Thayer, but Thayer was having none of it. He wasn’t particularly impressed with Fate, for one thing: “Fate is published by Palmer, the Astounding man who gave Shaver to a gaping world.” For another, he didn’t like what Clouser had written: “What you detect of Thayer in Clouser on Fort is that this ‘author’ rewrote selected paragraphs from the Introduction to the Books and called it an article. I wish some of them would dig up something new.” It is not an inaccurate assessment—particularly the physical description of Fort, about which Clouser leans a lot on Thayer—though it is uncharitable. There wasn’t much to find new about Fort, and mcc of the material was in Thayer’s possession. Another resident of Nowheresville, Pennsylvania, Damon Knight, would do better some twenty years on.
Clouser, it seems, became sidetracked. It was a hazard of life for many Forteans: the mundane always shadowing the anomalous, making it hard, if not impossible, to see.
Her grave lies high where wind and sun
Can play without frustration; And lads and maids when work is done
Stroll by in youth's elation.
But we to wind and sun are veiled
And droop at times with yearning;
Nor catch young voices bravely hailed
To life with quick discerning. We grieve that death in her must be,
Yet who is blessed, she or we?
But he also made concessions to the obvious and clerked for the state’s department of highways in the engineering section, where it seems he worked for the rest of his life. (He seems to have done statistical work, at one point calling himself a “traffic computer,” before that word became associated with the electronic machines we know today; in 1967, he was with the traffic volume unit.) He continued to live with his mother and grandfather, which would have allowed him to save some money. In 1940, he was making a respectable $1,500 a year, with only a high school education. (His grandfather was 95.) He enlisted as a private in the army on 20 March 1942, and served throughout the rest of World War II, part of that time—April 1944 to November 1945—in Europe, helping to re-establish order. He left the service that later month as a technical sergeant.
At some point in the 1950s—probably around August 1957—he married Larue Jennie Weirich. She had been born Larue Jennie Miller before being married, and had a son named Thomas. I do not know what happened with her first husband, whether they were divorced or he died. Thomas would have been around 15 at the time, near the age Clouser was when he lost his own father. In 1961, Mary passed away, leaving Clouser bereft of the family with which he had grown up. He and LaRue—married when he was in his late 40s, she in her late 30s—never had children of their own. They made good money, though, Clouser pulling in some $9,000 per year, his wife half of that, also working for the same department. (That’s about $100,000 in today’s moneys.)
In the early 1960s, the family became involved in a mini-scandal related to Pennsylvania government (which is how I know their salaries.) Supposedly, LaRue chafed under the supervision of one particular boss to whom she had been re-assigned; she was offered a different position, refused, and was fired for insubordination. At least, that was the state’s case. Clouser insisted that the problem was the new head of the highway department, a Republican who nonetheless insisted that employees go to a $100-per-plate Democratic fundraiser (featuring JFK). LaRue, he said, was fired for refusing. The brouhaha made the Associated Press; there were hearings on the state level; but I do not know if the decision was ever reversed.
During this time, Clouser was apparently also writing; his favorite subject seems to have been the paranormal, and he kept notebooks with clippings on various outré subjects, such as Roger Bacon’s hidden secrets and new sources of energy. While there are reports that he wrote many popular articles, I have found only one, in addition to the poem. I have also seen reference to a letter that he wrote to the Journal of Paraspychology—put out by J.B. Rhine’s group at Duke University—but not the letter itself. In one biographical fragment, he said he was a member of the American Society for Psychical Research (which actually was at odds with Rhine, who offered naturalistic explanations as opposed to the Society’s more spiritualistic ones).
Clouser died 2 May 1986, aged 77. LaRue outlived him by two decades, passing away 19 April 2006, aged 85.
************************
I only have evidence of Clouser’s Fortean interests from the late 1940s—like many other Forteans, he did not seem to cross the decadal line. (Was there some cosmic symmetry between the name Fort and the decade of the forties?) Indeed, everything is from 1948 or 1949. But for someone whose Fortean activities seem so restricted (they could have continued privately, of course), we do know a fair amount Clouser’s thinking. He seems to have belonged to that class of Forteans who thought that Fort had generated real knowledge, which should be investigated by scientists and, eventually, allowed into the book of scientific knowledge. Which is to say he did not belong to the group of Forteans who saw Fort as undermining scientific knowledge, nor to those—Theosophists, mainly but not entirely—who saw Fort as contributing to some form of knowledge greater than science. His own contributions were to add to the heap of “damned” data and to speculate on possible explanations for pieces of it. We do not know, though, how Clouser discovered Fort or the Fortean Society. Certainly, some one with predilections toward the paranormal and parapsychology would likely have come across the name at some point.
His first appearance in Doubt—and the first indication of his Forteanism—came in issue 21 (June 1948). Thayer printed (part of?) a letter Clouser had sent. It was a hypothesis for the action of maternal impressions—that is to say, how a mother’s mood might physically manifest itself on the baby in her womb. There had been a long tradition of such thought, though it had fallen out of favor as embryologists showed there was no nervous connection between mother and baby. Clouser wanted to save the phenomena and explain it with the kind of “wild talents” that Rhine studied and Clouser thought were not so much wild as latent in the human body. He wrote,
“The prevalence of ‘old wives’ tales’ alleging instances where mothers have ‘marked’ their babies seems to me sufficiently challenging to warrant investigations, in spite of the dictum of embryologists not he subject.
“Summarily to reject such cases in toto as deliberate falsifications or benighted delusions, on the ground that no neural connection exists between mother and embryo or foetus, seems comparable with the not-so-old orthodoxy regarding meteorites: that no stones being in the sky, stones do not, therefore, fall from the sky.
“I think there is a possibility that birthmark is psychosomatically induced in the embryo or foetus, the condition being ‘triggered’ by telepathic projection of mental state from the mother.”
As “prima facie” evidence for this speculation, he pointed to the psychometric telepathy experiments of Dr. J. Hettinger and the work of Upton Sinclair and his wife on “mental radio.” He noted in particular that the Sinclairs had shown that emotions could be passed from tester to testee. He then laid out his hypothesis, claiming that in light of the likelihood of telepathic powers being present in human, and the undeniable fact that they were present in animals—it was the only explanation for what he called “mass mind”; I am not sure what that is—then it made sense that the embryo, as it ontogenically recapitulated phylogenetic history (that is to say, as the embryo traversed evolutionary history, from fish to reptile to mammal), it would enter a stage in which it was especially susceptible to telepathic forces.
Clouser submitted his idea to Dr. Gardner Murphy, of the University of California and a member of the ASPR, who thought it perfectly amenable to scientific investigation. Clouser himself hoped an obstetrician at a large hospital would take up the matter. The problem could be solved statistically, he thought, keeping records on maternal moods and birthmarks. The only issue he could see was that mothers might become scared, but tactful questioning could obviate that objection. Evidently, Clouser was proud of his idea, and touted it in Fate magazine later that year, claiming himself to have “formulated the hypothesis of birthmark causation by telepathic projection of mother’s mental state to the foetus or embryo.” As far as I know, though, he never got the experiments done.
Four issues later—Doubt 25, summer 1949—Clouser appeared for his second time in the magazine, this time another (excerpted?) letter. He wrote, “Rummaging through one of my old notebooks recently, I ran across two clippings, copies of which are attached, recounting a story of the translation of some double-cipher manuscripts attributed to Roger Bacon, were said to anticipate the telescope, the microscope, speculations and discoveries in astronomy of the time of Kepler . . .” He continued with other possible breakthroughs Bacon may have made, these in biology and the production of energy, then closed wondering why scientists would have ignored and forgotten Bacon’s contributions. This musing was accompanied by two enclosures, one from “The Youth’s Companion,” dated 1921 and the other from the same magazine in 1927. These revealed that the ciphered documents were the so-called Voynich manuscript—a still undecided work—and its supposed decipherment by the University of Pennsylvania’s W. Romaine Newbold. “If the manuscripts are even to a degree what they were cracked up to be, the matter is definitely of Fortean interest,” Clouser said.
His final appearance in Doubt came in the next issue (26, dated October 1949). In some ways it built on his previous note, though the exact line of his thought is hard to follow, probably because of the way Thayer edited the letters. In regards to the supposed Bacon manuscript, Clouser had wondered if Bacon had already discovered the so-called “miracle motor” of J. W. Keely, which had been mentioned in Fort’s “Wild Talents,” among other places. It seems that Clouser had followed out this thread, continuing to investigate Keely, and coming to the conclusion that he was a fraud, based on recent articles in Science Digest and The Northwestern Engineer. These showed that Keely had run his machine on a hidden high-pressure hydraulic system. That Clouser was willing to abandon Keely based on scientific investigation reiterates the class of Forteans to which he belonged.
In between these appearances, Clouser had his greatest contribution to the Fortean cause. Only recently, Ray Palmer, the science fiction writer and editor, had been forced out at Amazing Stories because his “Shaver Mystery” had so upset science fiction fans. He went on to co-found Fate magazine, where he was more free to indulge in paranormal speculation. (He wrote here under the name Robert N. Webster.) Fate magazine obviously overlapped with Forteanism, and Thayer noted its coming into being. In the third issue, dated fall 1948, that connection was made explicit, with Clouser writing an article on Charles Fort. The British Fanzine “Fantasy Review,” noted, “Fate, which promises to appear bimonthly henceforth, and vigorously denies a competitor's assertion that it is an ‘occult’ magazine, continues to interest fantasistes generally. In the third (Fall, '48) issue, Charles Fort gets yet another write-up by Frederick Clouser, who calls him the "Apostle of the Impossible.”
The article started with what had been Fate’s first and favorite story, flying saucers, linking them to Fort’s writing, then moving on the consider his industry and rescue him from being dismissed as a crank. There was biographical information, a description of his writing style and personal style. Clouser contrasted him with Ripley and other writers of a similar tact by looking at Fort’s investigation of falling frogs. The believe-it-or-not camp accepted the proposition that such animal rains were caused by cyclones, but Fort asked why the rains should include only a single species, why they should occur where they did? “Like a dog with a bone, he worries his subject,” Clouser noted. After touching on the founding of the Fortean Society—and before returning to it as continuing his work of forever questioning easy answers—Clouser listed a few other anomalies, as though he were continuing Fort’s work—as R. DeWitt Miller did, as Vincent Gaddis (who also wrote for this issue) did, as Donald Whitacre did and Vol Molesworth hoped to do.
Clouser wondered what could account for the migration and directional ability of birds. He mused over the claim that the pyramids of Gaza stood at the central point of the world’s land mass. He mentioned a series of mysterious fires in Indiana. He asked readers to consider dreams that came true. (In the attached biography, he mentioned this theory of maternal impressions.) “There is more in heaven and earth than we are wont to dream of in our little system of knowledge,” he said, playing off of Shakespeare. “We live in a strange and awful universe.” But these were facts, not mere delusions, and, like Fort, he cited sources for them all, experiments by H. L. Yearly at Penn State on birds’s directional abilities; a 1937 article from the Harrisburg Telegraph on the placement of Egyptian pyramids (part of a series called “Strange As It Seems”); and an insurance advertisement from Collier’s (where Miller’s articles appeared).
One wonders that Clouser did not supply the Fortean Society with a whole host of material. He seems to have had a large collection of clippings, which he kept organized and updated. Perhaps he reserved them for himself, to form the basis of his own speculations—thus what appeared in Doubt were letters, not credits for clippings. Perhaps he did send them in, and they did not appear. Perhaps he lost interest in Forteana soon after joining the Society, moved by other matters. Perhaps Thayer was not keen on Clouser, and so did little to highlight his work.
There is some evidence for the last perhaps. Donald Bloch seems to have commended the Fate article to Thayer, but Thayer was having none of it. He wasn’t particularly impressed with Fate, for one thing: “Fate is published by Palmer, the Astounding man who gave Shaver to a gaping world.” For another, he didn’t like what Clouser had written: “What you detect of Thayer in Clouser on Fort is that this ‘author’ rewrote selected paragraphs from the Introduction to the Books and called it an article. I wish some of them would dig up something new.” It is not an inaccurate assessment—particularly the physical description of Fort, about which Clouser leans a lot on Thayer—though it is uncharitable. There wasn’t much to find new about Fort, and mcc of the material was in Thayer’s possession. Another resident of Nowheresville, Pennsylvania, Damon Knight, would do better some twenty years on.
Clouser, it seems, became sidetracked. It was a hazard of life for many Forteans: the mundane always shadowing the anomalous, making it hard, if not impossible, to see.
