Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, May 1922 · page 35 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #33 — page 35: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains sentimental editorial content and the beginning of a sermon, with no visible cartoons. The first section eulogizes someone named "Payne," likely John Howard Payne, who wrote the song "Home! Sweet Home!" Despite being homeless thirty years, he's celebrated for creating art that comforted working people—sailors, miners, herders, travelers. The passage sentimentalizes "home" as essential to human meaning and spirituality. The second section introduces Rev. John Wesley Holland's sermon on "Hot Boxes" (overheated train bearing systems), published in *The Crescent*, the Shriners' magazine. It begins with an impatient businessman frustrated by a stalled locomotive, setting up what appears to be a moral lesson about patience or industrial progress versus human values—likely continuing on the next page. The tone is earnest rather than satirical; no specific satire is evident 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 33 Payne will be long and lovingly remem- bered, not because he was a popular actor for thirty years, or a dramatist of successful plays, but as a man who, though homeless for the last thirty years of his life, nevertheless wrote a song which has cheered loneliness, melting the ice gathered on hearts through years of sin and hardship—of the sailor-lad on the deep, the miner crushing quartz in the Golden Valley, the herdsman galloping over the plain, the traveler in foreign lands, and explorer in dark- est Africa. Home may be “humble” in cave or cliff lighted with stars, tent or reeds lit with fire- fly, log or clay cabin illumined by fireplace and candle, but blot out this word “home,” and you blot out the words hope, happiness and heaven. Without the idea of home, labor is lifeless, literature is dull, canvas fades, marble crum- bles, music is silent, the sky has no sun, man has no soul and heaven has no God. “Home! home! sweet, sweet home! There’s no place like home!” * * * THE Rev. John Wesley Holland delivers the following sensible sermon on “Hot Boxes,” through the columns of The Crescent, which is the official organ of the Shriners. “Why in—don’t we go?” The owner of the voice was a big man of business, and was in a hurry. The train, the finest that American ingenuity could invent, was stalled. You ought to have seen that engine. Twin four; horse power to burn; the last word