Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1921 · page 5 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #23 — page 5: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous personal essay rather than a cartoon. The author recounts a cautionary tale about alcohol temptation during Prohibition era (references to "the wagon" suggest abstinence efforts). The narrative describes receiving a suspicious bottle of bourbon—likely bootleg liquor, given the "peculiar shade" of the bonded stamp, a detail suggesting counterfeit authenticity markers. The author jokes that the whiskey tasted poor ("reverse action to an old maid's age") and suspects it was adulterated with harsh additives: cayenne pepper, ether, and tobacco sauce. The piece satirizes both the poor quality of illegal alcohol during Prohibition and the narrator's own weakness in breaking sobriety. The self-deprecating tone ("the devil got the upper hand") and the previous anecdote about a friend's drunken behavior with cotton illustrate the social consequences of drinking.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 3 Drippings From the Fawcett A FEW months ago a newspaper friend of mine in New Orleans wrote about having taken a drink of the Louisiana brand and then backing against a bale of cotton as he said: “Come on, boy, let’s go.” I didn’t appre-ciate his humor very much at that time because I had been on the wagon for several months. I had not touched the “fiery flare” that “steal-eth away the mind” principally because the morning after the night before found me in such condition that it seemed to take months of the “tapering off” process to get back in shape. However, the devil got the upper hand again and, as usual, there was the devil to pay. Some-body presented me with a nice, new-appearing black bottle bearing a shiny, greenish colored label. The alleged bonded stamp had a peculiar shade and indicated a bourbon of twelve sum-mers. The contents, however, bore the taste of a reverse action to an old maid’s age. But the cayenne pepper, ether and tobasco sauce got in its damnable work.