Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, May 1921 · page 7 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #20 — page 7: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is the opening of "Captain Billy's Whiz Bang," a satirical humorist column. The narrator (Captain Billy) mocks contemporary Spring poetry and urban affectation, preferring rustic authenticity. He's relocated his family to a Minnesota lake cabin settlement. The satire targets an educated Minneapolis woman—"Miss B——"—described as an aristocratic snob utterly ignorant of actual rural life despite her education. She's portrayed as pretentious ("like an angel from Heaven") yet comically unprepared: she's never seen real pumpkins or understood soil, only read about such things in seminaries. The humor comes from anticipated culture-clash comedy: an urbane city girl encountering genuine country living and practical farming (the hired man, the pedigreed bull, wild asparagus). The setup implies she'll be humorously out of place and exposed as shallow. This reflects early-20th-century American satire mocking educated elites as disconnected from authentic "Mother Nature" and working rural America.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 5 HERE it is Spring, the poets are with us and the Thursday musicales can now render “The Com- ing of Spring” by a scanty Aphrodite girlie in true aesthetic rhythm, but I hearken naught to their artificial atmosphere. I crave Mother Nature in all its ruggedness. Hence I have fared to my log cabin settlement on the shores of Big Pelican lake in northern Minnesota, accompanied by Mrs. Bill, the five kids, my dog Shep, our new perfumed Persian pussy and, last but not least, the good, old pedigreed bull, Pedro. Fred La Page, my French-Canadian friend and the lord and master of the Pequot settlement, threw in a couple of cows in the deal wherein I acquired title to the cabins and the shore property and advised me to bring the pedi- greed bull along to keep the cowlets company. And so here we are at Pequot, and as I said before, it is Spring and the birdies are singing in the treelets. We’ve hardly been here a week when into our wild and wooded midst enters, like an angel from Heaven, a pretty young miss, a graduate of Minne- tocracy and unlearned in the ways of we simple country folk. She had never seen a real pumpkin sprout in the garden of nature and her knowledge of the products of the soil was confined to what she had read in some seminary institution. The first evening, Gus, our hired man, picked some of Brother La Page’s wild asparagus. We did it up in butter, as was my wife’s custom, and served it in big helpings on the old pine table. Miss B—, our guest and new acquaintance,