Monday, March 12, 2007

Shroud Take March 10, 2007

People living now think that serials like Spysmasher and Capt. America were fabricated out of whole cloth. But the fact of the business is that you had to be there. From the 1930 through the 1940s and into parts of the 1950s, even, industrial scientists, barnstormers and transient fellows somewhere between lawman and outlaw uncovered new apsectds of chemistry and electronics on a level not seen since. Quasi-secret organizations flourished in the Midwestern parts of the United States, many with the express purpose of forwarding science and art. It’s simply overlooked in the histories today, and why not? Reality is paling as enhancements to the serial heroes come to profligate on the Multimedea.

In Europe there were the Mussolini futurists, the left wing Dadaists. But the end of world war 2 things were pretty much down to the Kiwanis and the Elks. But I knew the real heroes of technology. I knew Shroud. Sort of a paramilitaries before I met him [in the days when he led the chemical dept in calisthenics’ and ultimate volley ball games] he’d become by the early cold war a semi-influential cathode visage.

The Shroud Valley Boys volley ballers still played and drank prestigiously into the 60s. his lab on the hill continued to churn out smoke as the sons of the original Shroudista volley ball team had pancake breakfasts below.
He became Shroud in a laboratory accident. What was SpySmasher like? I, a lad, asked.

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