Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, April 1922 · page 37 of 67
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #32 — page 37: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang contains no cartoon—it's a prose piece eulogizing **Riley Grannan**, a historical figure (1868-1908) who rose from bellboy to become a famous gambler and "plunger" (high-stakes bettor) before dying in Rawhide, Nevada. The passage is philosophically melancholic, contrasting Grannan's birth in Kentucky's fertile, beautiful landscape with his death in the harsh desert. It invokes **Robert Ingersoll's** famous agnostic grave oration to meditate on life's transience and inscrutability. Rather than satire or jokes, this reads as sincere reflection on human ambition and mortality—unusual for Whiz Bang, a typically comedic magazine. The tone suggests the editor using his platform for genuine social commentary about the futility of even spectacular worldly success when faced with death.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
36 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang and style as my brother the most humble of you all. If there may come from me a word of moral admonition, it springs not from a sense of moral superiority, only from the depths of my experience. "Riley Grannan was born at Paris, Ky., about forty years ago. He cherished all the dreams of boyhood. Those dreams found their fruition in phenomenal success financial. I am told that from the position of a bellboy in a hotel, he arose to be a celebrity of world wide fame. Riley Grannan was one af the greatest plungers the con-tinent has produced. He died day before yesterday at Rawhide. "That is a brief statement. We have his birth, and the day of his demise. Who can fill the interim? Not I. Who can tell his hopes and fears? Who knows the mystery of his quiet hours? Not I. "Riley Grannan was born in the sunny southland of Kentucky. He died in Rawhide. That is the beginning. That is the end. Is there in this picture of what Inger-soll said at the grave of his brother, 'Whether it be near the shore, or in mid-ocean, or among the breakers, at the last a rock must mark the end of one and all.' "Born where brooks and rivers run musically through prolific soil, where magnolia gladiflora, like white stars, glow in a firmament of green, where lakes, the greens-ward and the softest summer breezes dimple the wave-lets, where the air is resonant with the melody of a thousand sweet-voiced birds and redolent of the perfume of blooming flowers, that was the beginning. Riley Gran-nan died in Rawhide, where in winter the tops of the mountains are clothed in garments of ice and in summer the blistering rays of the sun beat down upon the skele-ton of the desert. "Is there in this a picture of universal life? Some-times, when I look upon the circumstances of life there comes to my lips a curse. I relate to you only my views. If these run counter to yours, believe that what I say is sincere. When I see the ambitions of man defeated, when I see him struggling with mind and body to ac-