Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, December 1921 · page 11 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #28 — page 11: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous anecdote from an early 20th-century satirical magazine. The text describes a social visit involving an Admiral and sailors from the USS Pennsylvania. The joke centers on the sailors' inability to maintain composure around women—they kept looking "upward" at the female guests boarding the ship, which the author attributes to sailors' habit of chewing "Bull of the Durham" (a tobacco brand), as if the nicotine made them restless and lustful. The secondary anecdote introduces "Gus," a hired hand who conveniently reappears to supply "medicine"—likely alcohol (the author mentions the Admiral visit was notably "dry"). This is presented as a comedic relief story. The humor relies on crude sailor stereotypes and innuendo typical of 1920s-era "gentleman's humor" magazines. No identifiable political figures appear on this page; it's purely social satire about naval life and working-class male behavior.
📄 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 9 sweet and low: "gawsch darn him") I had to drink tea. But the Admiral was a wonderful fellow—hale, hearty and well met. We exchanged anecdotes and spent a grand, though dry afternoon. Lieutenant Lewis and his crew of noblemen returned us to the dock in the starry BARGE. Now in the day of retrospection I fain would believe that the Admiral or his aide must have been in collusion with the "Pennsylvania" gobs because every last one of them either was bare- footed or reading Sam Clark's Jim Jam Jems or the little old Banger. Wonderful fellows, these jackies, but the pesky cusses just insisted on looking onward and upward (mostly up- ward) when the fairly formed feminines in the party mounted from deck to deck. They just couldn't control their naughty eyes. Possibly it had something to do with Bull of the Dur- ham, for I am told that the sailor boys love to roll their own. * * * NOW, Gentle Readers of this journal of uplift, I have one little wee surprise for you. Gus, my old time hired man, who jumped the job two months ago, located and surprised me at the Alexandria. Gus is a pestiferous cuss and has the faculty of bobbing up at the crucial moment. My "supply" had given out and promptly, even more promptly than had been his will to paint boats at Breezy Point Lodge, he supplied the missing medicine. It was "terrible stuff" but with the sailor boys