Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, January 1922 · page 11 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #29 — page 11: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains no cartoon imagery—it's prose narrative from Captain Billy's satirical magazine. The author recounts visiting San Francisco institutions: Alcatraz Island (holding ~500 soldiers awaiting court martial), and the city morgue and jail. The satire is subtle. The author mocks military bureaucracy ("tough and tedious red tape of Uncle Sam's court martial system") while describing being invited by the Jewish Welfare Board to perform for imprisoned soldiers. The tone shifts to dark humor when describing the morgue visit—he notes the "gruesome" nature is mitigated by the "marvelous furniture and apparatus," a darkly comic understatement about mortuary equipment. The piece appears to document a USO-style entertainment tour while simultaneously critiquing military justice and institutional life, typical of *Whiz Bang*'s irreverent humor targeting authority and American institutions. No specific political figures are named or caricatured here.
📄 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 Alcatraz Island, that silent citadel that illumines the skyline of Frisco's bay like a bleak battleship, is the temporary home of about five hundred United States soldiers who have become ensnarled in the tough and tedious red tape of Uncle Sam's court martial system. Prisons and morgues are two places I abhor, but it fell my lot to visit both in one night in San Francisco. It happened like this: While entertaining some new found Frisco friends in my room in the St. Francis Hotel, I was pleasantly surprised by the head director of the Jewish Welfare Board, Shea Swartz by name, who requested on behalf of the Board, that my pedigreed bunk be spread on the rocky soil of Alcatraz. The five hundred boys gathered in the barrack auditorium and gave the Whiz Bang a grand and glorious welcome. It was one of the bright lights of a very enjoyable tour of the coast. Later in the evening, accompanied by George Duffy and G. W. DeLano of the district attorney's office, we inspected the famous San Francisco morgue. It was a gruesome visit, I'll admit, but some of the curse was removed by the marvelous furniture and apparatus used in the handling of the unfortunate. From the morgue we glimpsed a view of the city jail, through the kind offices of Walter C.