Captain Billy's Whiz Bang - Volume Two Number Eighteen March, 1921: (1/2) Smokehouse Poetry

Описание: CAPTAIN BILLY'S WHIZ BANG.....
Was an iconic magazine of wit and humor launched by W.H. Fawcett in 1919. Each sixty four page issue was packed with jokes, quips, and humorous bits of writing. Each year it grew in popularity, and Fawcett’s success lead to the formation of the well-known Fawcett Publications, which issued Whiz Comics and introduced Captain Marvel. The magazine was immortalized in a line in the song “Trouble” from Meredith Wilson’s “The Music Man.”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY.....
Wilford Hamilton Fawcett (April 29, 1885 – February 7, 1940) also known as Captain Billy, was an American magazine publisher and sports shooter. He competed in the trap event at the 1924 Summer Olympics. At the age of sixteen, Fawcett ran away from home to join the U.S. Army, and the Spanish–American War took him to the Philippines. Back in Minnesota, he became a police reporter for the Minneapolis Journal. While a World War I Army captain, Fawcett's experience with the Army publication Stars and Stripes gave him the notion to get into publishing, and his bawdy cartoon and joke magazine, Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, became the launch pad for the vast Fawcett Publications publishing empire embracing magazines, comic books and paperback books.

The title Captain Billy's Whiz Bang combined Fawcett's military moniker with the nickname of a destructive World War I artillery shell. According to one account, the earliest issues were mimeographed pamphlets, typed on a borrowed typewriter and peddled around Minneapolis by Captain Billy and his four sons. However, in Captain Billy's version, he stated that when he began publishing in October 1919, he ordered a print run of five thousand copies because of the discount on a large order compared with rates for only several hundred copies. Distributing free copies of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang to wounded veterans and his Minnesota friends, he then circulated the remaining copies to newsstands in hotels. With gags like, "AWOL means After Women Or Liquor", the joke book caught on, and in 1921, Captain Billy made the highly inflated claim that his sales were "soaring to the million mark.

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