Part 1

Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, Vol. II. No. 13, October, 1920

AN OPEN LETTER

The Whiz Bang Farm, Rural Route No. 2, Robbinsdale, Minn.

To Our Readers:

With this issue, Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang discards swaddling clothes and starts bounding on its second year of existence. In this number, which we have termed “Our Annual,” the writer has taken the liberty to review many of the stories and poems from the 12 previous issues. It is obvious that a new publication must start with no circulation. If it strikes a popular appeal in the heart-chord of human existence it succeeds; otherwise, it sinks into journalistic oblivion.

Thanks to a legion of loyal readers and volunteer scribes, The Whiz Bang has weathered the colicky and diarrhoetic stage of life. Our eye-teeth have been cut and the worst is over. This little family journal of uplift has no one to thank but its readers. It is your magazine and it is you who send in the snappy articles to fill its pages each month. Again we extend our heartiest thanks.

We are now spread from the mackerel munching macaroons of Manhattan’s bright isle to the squawking squabs of sunny California; from the wily, wicked pole-cats of Northern Minnesota to the perk and prim creoles of feverish Orleans.

On this month, the month of our birth, the editor feels as happy as a kid sucking a lollypop and smearing its chin with an ice cream cone. All we lack to complete the illusion is about three fingers in a wash-tub. Adios until November rolls ’round.

CAPTAIN BILLY.

_Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang_

OUR MOTTO: “_Make It Snappy_”

October, 1920 Vol. II. No. 13

Published Monthly by W. H. Fawcett, Rural Route No. 2 at Robbinsdale, Minnesota

Entered as second-class matter May 1, 1920, at the post office at Robbinsdale, Minnesota, under the Act of March 3, 1879.

_Price 25 cents_ _$2.50 per year_

_“We have room for but one soul loyalty and that is loyalty to the American People”--Theodore Roosevelt._

Copyright 1920 By W. H. Fawcett

_Edited by a Spanish and World War Veteran and dedicated to the fighting forces of the United States, past, present and future._

_Skipping with the Skipper_

Just one short year ago, under the above caption: “Skipping With the Skipper,” Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang exploded for the first time. It was the publisher’s idea at that time to compile a snappy joke-book for former soldiers, sailors and marines living in the immediate vicinity of the village of Robbinsdale. The demand greatly exceeded the initial press run, and we’ve been running ever since.

For the benefit of new readers, the opening explanation for our existence on this mundane sphere is herewith re-published. It explains itself, I believe:

=Whiz-z Bang!!! We’re off and in our trail follows a mighty explosion of pedigreed bull. “Make It Snappy” is our motto. Snap! Pep! Ginger! Even more. The first issue of CAPTAIN BILLY’S WHIZ BANG is off the press and with its advent the editor and contributors hope to have added something really worth while to brighten the atmosphere of human existence. Captain Billy’s only and original WHIZ BANG will explode in every issue. No “duds” allowed in our monthly Literary Indigestion. Today we are the Cherry Sisters of journalism with the fond hopes for “Big Time” sometime.=

=As the old saying goes, “Laugh and the world laughs with you, near beer and you drink alone.” If we dance we must pay the jazz band; no matter what we get we must “put up or shut up.” Doctors of Dope and Doctors of Divinity must have the price of our life and love and the undertaker smiles with a self-satisfied grin as our mortal flesh and bones are delivered to the charnel house.=

=Therefore the motto of the WHIZ BANG will be: Be happy while you live; live a full life and while you are living, live on the square so you may be able to follow that quaint western philosophy and look every man in the face and tell him to go to Hell.=

=Please do not get the impression from the title page that the WHIZ BANG is to be a military publication only. There will be 100 laughs for the service man and 97¼ laughs for the civilian. We will give the soldier, sailor and marine the benefit of two and three-quarters per cent because we believe he is fairly entitled to it. (Brewers please note.)=

=THE WHIZ BANG is only in its infancy, so look for the November issue. Then we will burst out and explode into a full-grown bull. We will be fatter, lovelier, snappier and juicier and--oh, girls, we just hate to tell you. Watch for Mr. November and see if we don’t make Bill Bryan’s Commoner drier than an Algerian caravan in the Sahara desert, 20 miles from the oasic grog shop and the Cliquot Special two weeks overdue. The bull is only half grown and he surely will be some lively animal next month when we sling him over to our readers.=

=Those of us who have lived through the past five years have the satisfaction of knowing that we have seen the mightiest and most stirring five years in history, and we are watching from day to day the unfolding and ending of the colossal drama. Never has there been such a crashing of empires, such a falling of thrones, such righting of wrongs and deliverance of the oppressed, such vivid demonstration of the wickedness, the folly and the weakness, the nobility, the wisdom and the courage of which human nature is capable.=

=As a grand finale, an alleviation from the terrific strain, Billy’s WHIZ BANG will come as a relieving Balsam--an ointment on the checkered skein of life. Please remember that the oldest truths are the freshest. They are rich with the blood of humanity. As the apple tree in your yard may be a sprout from the apple tree in the Garden of Eden, so the idea that just came to you may be the same that struck King Solomon. Thoughts are deciduous, as trees, and appear green and fresh to each generation, and like desert soil, we are unfurrowed and unfettered. THE EDITOR.=

_The Crap Shooting Major_

By SKIPPER BILL.

This is a story of a major in the Motor Mechanics brigade, Signal Corps, U. S. Army,--A. C. Rebadow, by name. He hails from the city of Buffalo, N. Y., where he was employed in an automobile manufacturing plant and received his commission because of the supposition that he was a motor sharp.

“Soldiering” and gambling go hand in hand. The greatest indoor sport of the military man is to riffle the “pasteboards,” while his outdoor pastime consists of blowing on a pair of galloping dominoes as he prays for a “natural” to rear itself heavenward. Rebadow is neither soldier nor gambler but a dyed-in-the-wool squawker.

The “major’s” system was simple. If he lost he merely issued checks on his bank at Tonawanda, N. Y., and then “Stopped Payment,” on them. So simple, in fact, that his racial instinct led him promptly to the telegraph office to void the payment.

The Major relied upon military discipline to save him from his outraged victims. He believed that none would have nerve enough to make complaint against his ungentlemanly and indecent behavior, but at least on one occasion he reckoned without his host. That was at Camp Hancock, Georgia, where Rebadow lost $400 during several days’ indulgence at craps. The victim, however, took the matter up with the superior officers.

Rebadow was traced to an air post far behind the whiz bangs’ zone where he possibly imagined himself safe from his debtors as well as from the Jerries. This is a letter which compelled payment. It was written by one superior officer to another, the commandant at the air post where Rebadow was then situated:

“1. It is requested that the Commanding Officer of A. A. A. P. No. 1 take this matter up personally with Major Rebadow, as the following are the facts in the case, as can be supported by the record of the Motor Mechanics Brigade, which records I have personally inspected. Several months ago an exhaustive investigation of the merits of this case was made and it was shown that Major Rebadow was entirely in the wrong in this matter and was dropped on account of an indorsement he signed in which he stated he would make good the amount of these checks, approximately $400.

“2. The unprincipled manner in which Major Rebadow now treats this matter is considered so reprehensible that effort is being made to secure the forwarding of the personal file of Major Rebadow and he may be informed that unless this account has been settled by the time those records are received that this office will make all efforts to have Major Rebadow brought to trial as a result of his derelictions.”

Needless to say, Major Rebadow cowered before the eye of his superior officer and forthwith repaid the broken pledge.

I look back on my days in the ranks, where a man was a man, true blue and shorn of falsity, insolence, domineering and double-crossing ways. They were the days when we got paid together, painted the town together, and went broke together, where every man “shot square” with his “buddie.”

As for this crap-shooting major, he is in civies again and military discipline will afford him no protection for such breeches.

* * * * *

Willie and Mollie played in the sand, Indulging in youthful folly; The sun was hot on Willie’s back, And the sand was hot to Mollie.

* * * * *

’Twas Ever Thus

Every time we see an article offered at an uncommonly low price--whether it be shoes, prunes, fountain pens, wood blocks, or a personal service of some kind--we are reminded of Chief Big Smoke.

The owner of this picturesque name was a copper-colored native employed as a missionary to his fellow smokes out in Oklahoma. A tourist once asked him what he did for a living.

“Umph!” said Big Smoke, “me preachum.”

“That so? What do you get for preaching?”

“Me get ten dollars a year.”

“Well,” commented the white man, “that’s d----n poor pay.”

“Umph!” replied Big Smoke, “me d----n poor preacher.”

* * * * *

The Eternal Feminine

Women want marriage and a home. They should. And there are more women than men. Even before the war there was, in Europe and America, an extra sixth woman for every five men, and the sixth woman brings competition. She bulls the market, and makes feminine sex solidarity impossible. And, of course, added to that is the woman who requires three or four men to make her happy, one to marry and support her, and one to take her to the theatre and to luncheon at Delmonico’s, and generally fetch and carry for her, and one to remember her as she was at nineteen and remain a bachelor and have a selfish, delightful life, while blaming her.--Mary Roberts Rinehart.

* * * * *

Move Over

Bridget failed to get up one morning to cook breakfast for the Smith family. Instead she yelled downstairs that she was “pretty sick.”

Mr. Smith promptly summoned his family doctor who gave the “sick” servant a thorough examination. The doctor was unable to find anything wrong with Bridget.

“My good woman,” he said, “you’re not sick at all.”

“I know I’m not,” Bridget replied, “but the Smiths owe me $20 and I’m going to stay in bed until they pay me.”

“Well, if that’s the case, move over; they owe me $50.”

_Golightly Highballs_

BY REV. “GOLIGHTLY” MORRILL.

Mexico

V. C. in Vera Cruz stands for Venereal City. “El Dictamen” is the leading newspaper. It has only four pages, yet whole columns are filled with advertised cures for scrofula, syphilis, locomotor-ataxia and all the rotten ills that licentious Latin-America is heir to. The space we give to weather reports on the front page, or to special news with extra headlines, is given up here to nauseating advertisements. The first thing one sees as he enters the plaza are billboards, walls and buildings with sure-cure advertisements.

L. A. in Latin America stands for “licentious animals.” In Vera Cruz the principal male pastime is to talk about girls and not of God. From 4 P. M. to 2 A. M. men sit in the plaza portales drinking, smoking and talking about the women who pass by. The leading subject of “town talk” is girls, the one they went to the movie with last, the other one the night before, and the one they hope to get tonight.

The people make themselves a sewer for immoral filth, court the devil Lust that eats and burns up their blood; are spendthrifts of body and soul; waste their inheritance to purchase dirty, loathed disease; pawn their bodies to a dry-rot evil; make themselves patients for Lust’s rendezvous, a hospital, where their bill of fare is pills, not beef, and the doctor’s bill is longer than the moral law they have violated. What I have written here about Vera Cruz morals applies to the rest of Mexico where conditions are the same or worse.

The Ten Commandments are little in evidence in the country and free love prevails with the fruit of seventy-five per cent of illegitimate births. A respectable bachelor is not qualified to enter society until several children call him “papa.” Few men are without a separate establishment for affinities.

Honolulu

The Hawaiians are out and out in their dancing. They do not gloss it over and wear no hypocritical fig-leaves. They do not throw masks or mantles over their viciousness, under the guise of religious charity balls and philanthropic society parties. The hula is a hip dance, but the Hawaiians are not “hip”--ocritical in doing it. The dance is not sad or hippish but one of joy.

I have seen many dances--the Apache in Paris, du ventre in Cairo, the can-can in Buenos Aires, and with money here in Honolulu one can arrange with a chauffeur or at a hula house to see a hula combining all these vile and violent exhibitions. It is a composite of the compost of all dirty dances, most delightfully depraved, innocent of decency and shame, the dancers being quite careless about the exposure of their legs, arms and charms. What captivating indelicacy, so disturbing to the looker-on. But this it not the native hula. There is sufficient of the sun and volcano without it. The whites have taken away the native naivete and added their own nastiness. As a physiological study the dance is informing. In antiquity these antics were a religious service, combining poetry, pantomime and passion. The old edition of the heathen hula dance has been expurgated, but Christian foot-notes suggest more.

At one hula house I witnessed an unscheduled fight between several sailors who had quarreled over the charms of a hula girl with the result of broken heads, hearts and furniture. The native proprietor welcomed us with characteristic Hawaiian hospitality--we could eat, drink and stay as long as we pleased--all night in fact, with his hula girls for company. I thanked him for his ancient, beautiful and unbounded generosity but told him I was married and a minister, although he seemed unable to understand why that should make any difference with me, since it made little to some of the local clergy and laity.

One day at high noon, not night, I saw several native women bathing at Waikiki beach. All they had on was a holoku night-gown that was as good as nothing when wet. Three white, male strangers sauntered up from the nearby hotel, waded in, threw their arms around the girls and were guilty of “divers” familiarities. The girls didn’t object to the conduct of the boys. I couldn’t help seeing or thinking whether the fishes swam away or stayed and blushed all colors. Here was a “freedom of the seas” I refer to the naval board for diplomatic discussion.

God’s righteousness is like the great mountains. I often thought, as I marvelled at the islands’ scenery, that there are sermons in stones, but men do not listen; summits preach high ideals and purity, but people are deaf; and nature’s green only looks down on the mud and mire of lucre, lies, lust and laziness.

Havana

Havana is a fool’s Paradise--a lunatic limbo for people with loud clothes, lots of money, loose morals and light heads. It is the place where bad folks go to have a good time. The more disreputable a city is, the more popular it is to high society.

I have visited Havana many times and found the H in its name stood for Hell, not Heaven. On a recent sojourn I asked a traveling companion what the state of religion was and if Havana’s morals were improved. “Oh, yes, there has been a great reformation.” He had scarcely made this gratifying statement when a young man came up to me and showed some vile postcards and postals which he offered for sale. This did not happen in a side street at night, but in Central Park at noon.

Havana has reformed! The city has no “segregation,” but you may walk for miles along streets to the waterfront and find every other house with a seductive senorita at the door or window with extended hand or winsome voice urging you in broken Spanish or English to forsake the counsel of your mother’s Bible. Regular saloons and concert halls had scores of the women of the town at the tables sitting with motley men, while glasses clinked and phonographs scratched their screechy music. This was all bad enough but the lowest hell was reached when I saw a woman standing in the doorway offering to sell a girl of about 14 who stood by her side. At the end of certain streets the police were on watch to keep the women off the sidewalks, and so maintain an appearance of decency and order. Other places were unwatched and free.

Havana has reformed! The sporting women of the town advertise in several of the local magazines, where you find their photos, house address and some such paragraph in Spanish or in English for the benefit of the American tourist: “Tourist! Do you wish a good house in Havana, with plenty of women, pretty and elegant? Go to ---- street, No. ----, ask for Helena. Go today.” Here’s another: “Artistic Academy. If you want a place for pleasure and a good time, go to ----, plenty of nice girls.” Another want ad reads: “Ladies from all nations,” and still another, “Violeta has moved to ---- street, and with her Parisian arts welcomes the Havana public.”

Poor pleasure-seekers, whose law is fashion and folly their pursuit! Bubbles on the wave of pleasure, a tracery on the sand which Time’s tide will soon erase. Every year the siren voice of Havana calls, “Come in your private yacht on the Gulf Stream of gold; come with full purse and empty head and heart; come, you ‘best’ society, that you may be seen at your worst; come, all ye who would desert the temple of your mind and soul for this Circe’s palace of fleshy pleasures!”

Central America

Hamlet found something “rotten in the state of Denmark,” but it was sweet compared with what I discovered in Central America--the land of eruption and corruption, of dirt, disease, destitution, darkness, dilapidation, despots, delay, debt, deviltry and degeneracy, where a conservative estimate makes 90 per cent of the women immoral, 95 per cent of the men thieves, and 100 per cent of the population liars.

While strolling about the sultry seaport of Amapala, Spanish Honduras, and thinking of Morazan, the great Honduran liberator, two deceitful dames sought to enslave me. I was a stranger and they tried to take me in--their home nearby. Fortunately a policeman came up and warned me in broken English that these girls were “always--very--bad--to--everybody.” Each one took my arm and I thought it was time to take to my legs and get away. Anticipating my flight, one of them sprang upon me, wrapped her nether limbs about my waist and her arms around my neck. Thus in broad daylight in the heart of the town and in full view of the passerby I was attacked and assaulted. What a shipwreck of character might have happened had I landed at night! I hurried back to the ship and sought the seclusion my cabin afforded. The captain congratulated me on my narrow escape and informed me that on nearly every trip to this port native women of the town attempt to smuggle themselves at night on board to exchange their morals for the sailors’ money.

Panama

The last time I visited the Panama Canal it was closed, but the town was wide open. Former streets called straight were crooked and some rescued territory had relapsed. Just off the main street the scarlet woman and the red light flourished and flaunted. Posing as bar-girls these women came out boldly with the bar-sinister of their profession, came with forbidden fruit from the “Cocoa Grove,” and exposed it for sale on West Sixteenth street, contaminating the young. The groves may have been God’s first temples, but not this Panama “Cocoa” one. Here Satan conducts services every day of the year and passion-fruit is offered all who walk its thoroughfares. One finds all colors, classes and conditions of carnality. The U. S. soldiers are the police because the Panamanian police hate our boys sober or drunk, and when our boys had a fight the Panamanians beat them up. There are dens of high and low degree, full of filth, profanity, drunkenness, disease and debauchery, I know, for I saw, and I saw because I was there for local color and it was black enough.

Panama is famous for its canal, the wedlock of the oceans, but the city Panama is infamous, knows little of the family word “wedlock” and its red light “Cocoa Light” would make the fabled Daphne Grove wither up with envy. From the first to the fifteenth of each month the U. S. soldiers receive their pay and spend a large amount of it here in wine, women and song. In this pandemonium of profligacy, one may see, at any hour of the day or night, a brave soldier boy, intoxicated with love or liquor, sitting in a doorway with a half-dressed, bare-legged girl in his lap. These girls are o. k.’d by an M. D. twice a week and pronounced all right. Our soldiers cannot leave camp and visit them without a card certificate of good character. After they have made a night of it the boys repair to the “House of Lords” in the district and receive a bath and inoculation of anti-venereal dope. If they fail to take this treatment and are contaminated, they suffer more ways than one, being compelled to pay a fine. This is all too bad. Pleasures pure and simple should be given them at camp or in barracks. As it is, many of them are “shot to hell” before they ever go to war. If they have any extra money, strength or inclination, they may hit the opium-pipe, buy a get-rich-quick lottery ticket, or on Sunday attend a bullfight. A modern St. Anthony would find it difficult to withstand the temptations of this zone. More than one Pan-American religious conference is needed to make the moral atmosphere as pure as the city streets are clean. It is a bigger job to kill the devil than to exterminate the yellow-fever mosquito.

* * * * *

Friendship and Love

What causes the majority of women to be so little touched by friendship is that it is insipid when they have once tasted of love.

* * * * *

She Quit the Union

A party went to the opera and occupied a box. One of the men saw a raveling on the shoulder of one of the ladies. He picked it, and it kept on coming. He pulled and pulled till he had a tremendous mass, which he threw behind the door. Some days after the men met and talked it over. One of them said: “My wife had a good time, but she cannot figure out how she lost her union suit.”

_Highty-tighty Aphrodite_