Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1921 · page 9 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #23 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page is a humorous narrative story rather than a political cartoon. It's a comedic anecdote about a character named Gus who gets pickpocketed ("touched") at what appears to be a convention, losing money he'd hidden in his sock. The joke is his relief upon later discovering the money still there—he'd simply forgotten where he stashed it. The story escalates when Gus receives a telegram about "Pedro," apparently a prized bull at a packing plant who's fallen ill from homesickness. The satire targets sentimental attachment to livestock and the absurdity of a bull's emotional state being taken seriously by agricultural specialists. The repeated telegrams suggest escalating complications, typical of early-20th-century humor relying on miscommunication and dramatic reversals. Without seeing the second telegram's content, the full joke remains incomplete, but the tone is lighthearted, working-class comedy common to *Whiz Bang*, a post-WWI magazine known for irreverent, bawdy humor.
📄 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 7 Gus returned several hours later and, I am sorry to relate, was a little the worse for wear. He had a puzzled, sorrowful look on his face. After a few moments of hesitation he confessed—he had been “touched.” The mystery of the missing mazuma was cleared later that night when I coaxed him to take off his socks before crawling into bed. There in the dark recess of his left light blue stocking was hidden a five and a two dollar bill. “Gosh, but I for- got all about hiding it,” he exclaimed with a sigh of relief. Next day we “dolled up” as pretty as pos- sible so as to be somewhat presentable at the convention banquet. We had just started to leave the room when Gus became so grief stricken that I was forced to cancel the engage- ment and remain by his bedside. The shock came in the form of a telegram from Maggie, the hired girl, and read as follows: “Pedro took violently ill last night from heart disease—Horse Doctor Hawkins unable to diagnose his sickness and Pedro was rushed on truck to Minneapolis—Bull spe- cialists in the Midway Packing plant say his trouble is homesickness due to Gus’ absence—All hope given up— What shall we do?” An hour later, while Gus was still shedding tears and demanding that we return home at once, we received a second message, this one from my brother, which read: