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The esteemed Professor System? writes:

In these darker days Adlai Ewing Stevenson III (1900-1937*-1965) is remembered as a failed presidential candidate and intellectual. At best he is the butt of the occasional archaic joke, at worst forgotten completely. But there was a time – a time now erased, thanks to the cursed work of Lucifer, damn him – when the name Adlai was on every tongue from San Francisco, California, to Portland, Maine.

Not as a politician, of course. No, in this brighter 1923-1937 of which I speak, Adlai Stevenson was the first great celebrity of the Lampa Valley recording industry, and his beautiful renditions of standards such as “Faded Love,” “Low Whiskey,” and “My Wife (Died Seven Years Ago Today)” propelled him and the nascent commercial enterprise into exuberant success.

Adlai’s (like the Elvis of our era, he went by only his first name) image and unique sound changed the face of popular culture. A tireless crusader for civil rights, Adlai parlayed his cult of personality and vast celebrity into a voting-rights movement that swept the United States and made “discriminatory” a dirty word.

It is hardly surprising, then, that agents of Alistair “Doktor” Zuum marked him for death. Their fiendish assassination attempts were frustrated only by Adlai’s masterful tactical cunning and the diverse skills of his backup band, the Illinois Nineball Champs, each of whom possessed in addition to their musical skills, some special talent – a degree in astronomy, the ability to run a three minute mile, diamond-hard teeth – the judicious application of which thwarted Doktor Zuum’s plots time and time again.

From the terrifying apparitions of Doktor Zuum's Mercuric Men and his scheme to conquer the eastern seaboard to the pitched man-to-man fighting on hot Arabian soil with Doktor Zuum's Clockwork Army, Adlai and his allies stood boldly and firmly on the side of freedom and goodness.

It was not until the climactic Thirty Seconds of Silence on November 22, 1937, that Adlai and the Illinois Nineball Champs laid down their fiddles and rifles and petitions.

SEE ALSO: Doktor Zumm, Thirty Seconds of Silence

Lexicon 500 ABC | Aetheric Domain >

This is an A entry in the Lexicon of the Lost 500 Years.