Rudager P. Marshall

Born in Charleston, West Virginia, on March 18, 1922, to a coal mining family, Rudager P. Marshall quickly grew tired of listening to his father complain about aristocrats throwing cigarette filters and lit fireworks down the mine shafts while he labored.

At 14 years of age, Rudy, as he likes to be called, moved to New York City in search of bigger and better things.  He took a job at the mail room of a newspaper and slowly worked his way up, eventually becoming know for his right wing op/ed pieces.

In 1942, a wealthy Chicago businessman by the name of Percy L. Burton offered Rudy complete editorial powers over a new newspaper, the Chicago Daily Jobone.  Critics and readers immediately dismissed the paper for featuring an editorial as the top story (Burton is pictured at left holding the only issue).

Rudy left town disgraced.  He traveled across the nation, working many  simple jobs, dreaming of one day producing a newspaper full of opinion pieces.  He wrote a book, 1002 Puns, Jokes, and Boners, but it was soon found that it only contained a total of 993 puns and jokes, and zero boners.  Once again- disgraced.

In 1950, he moved to Los Angeles and took a job as a librarian.  Rudy stumbled across a copy of the Communist Manifesto, and instantly fell in love with its ideals.

Unfortunately, he was to spend the next 49 years of his life in jail for the murder of an Irishman; to this day he adamantly professes his innocence.

Rudy read many books while in jail- political ones like Animal Farm and Seinlanguage were favorites. After his sentence ended, he faced a strange, new world.  He took a job as a fry cook at a Chinese restaurant in Fresno and began to learn about the Internet.  The regularity of the flow of both ideas and products enchanted Rudy.

He soon began work on construction of The Rail, an online paper with the most ideological biases of any news source in the history of the world.  Whether it be the wit of the oligarchy, the hilarity of communism, or the downright goofiness and tomfoolery of fascism, The Rail covers it.

 
"'A poet's work,' he answers.  'To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.'  And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him.  He is the satirist, Baal."

-Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses