Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, December 1921 · page 39 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #28 — page 39: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from *Captain Billy's Whiz Bang* (a satirical magazine) features a section called "Smokehouse Poetry" that introduces poems by contributor Budd L. McKillips. The editorial introduces McKillips' new poem "The Girl From Over There" by referencing a recent real-life scandal: actress Zelda Crosby's suicide after being abandoned by a prominent film producer. The satire targets the hypocrisy of Hollywood's "purity crusaders"—reform-minded figures publicly advocating for moral standards in cinema while privately seducing and discarding women. McKillips, a newspaper reporter, draws his poetry from actual events (like a 1920s Minneapolis cabaret raid), making his work contrast with sentimental "armchair" verse. The page then reprints a melancholic poem titled "The Spirit of Mortal," emphasizing life's transience—a thematic echo of Crosby's tragedy. This juxtaposition of morality-preaching hypocrisy against inevitable human mortality forms the satirical commentary.
📄 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 37 Smokehouse Poetry Every once in a while we get regular he-man verse, prompted by dreams in some feather bed, but from the pen of Budd L. McKillips, Whiz Bang readers again are to be treated with a poem inspired by real life. In the Winter Annual of the Whiz Bang we reproduced Mr. McKillips' poem “After the Raid,” inspired while Mr. McKillips, as a newspaper reporter, “covered” a story of the raid on the National Dutch Room cabaret in Minneapolis. Recently pretty Zelda Crosby, picture scenario writer, of New York, committed suicide in a hotel by drinking poison, as a result of a prominent film magnate spurning her after teaching her the ways of love and folly. This magnate, like many other alleged reformers, has been a leading figure in the move- ment for purity in pictures. The title of Mr. McKillips poem, written exclusively for the Whiz Bang, is “The Girl From Over ‘There’.” In addition to that poem we are pub- lishing a crackerjack rival to the “Gila Monster Route,” with which Winter Annual readers have fallen in love, called “The Blanket Stiff.” * * * The Spirit of Mortal Oh, Why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-fleeting meteor, like a fast flying cloud, A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, He passeth from life to his rest in the grave. The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade, And be scattered around and together be laid, And the old and the young and the low and the high, Shall molder to dust and together shall lie. The infant a mother attended and loved,