Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1922 · page 39 of 67
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #36 — page 39: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains no cartoons—it's primarily text soliciting reader contributions. The "Smokehouse Poetry" section is an editorial call for folk songs and ballads associated with working-class American life: sailors, cowboys, miners, hoboes, and lumberjacks. These were authentic vernacular songs meant to preserve working-class cultural heritage. The brief "Paraphrased Piffle" poem below is a mild romantic joke: Captain Billy (the magazine's persona) asks a woman for kisses, and she responds coyly in French with "Billet-doux"—a pun playing on the captain's name ("Billy") and the French phrase meaning "love letter." The humor relies on the double meaning: she's making a flirtatious wordplay rather than granting his request. The overall tone is nostalgic and populist, celebrating rough-and-tumble American vernacular culture.
📄 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 Whiz Bang has had inquiries from many of its readers con- cerning old songs of the great outdoors; poetry and ballads sung by sou... and sailors, cowboys, pioneers, miners, hoboes and lumberjacks. From time to time we have published chan- teys that will go ringing down the ages. We would like to have some of our kind friends keep a weather eye out for any of the following masterpieces for use in our old Smokehouse corner: “The Bob-tailed Cannon-ball”; “The Wabash Cannon-ball”; “Some Going East—Some Going West”; Sleeping in a Box- car”; “Bound Away in the Twilight”; “I Want to Be An Injun; A Modoc or a Ute”; “Billy Leamont”; “The Water- tank”; “The Devil’s Ride”; “No More I’ll Go A-Roving and Pack My Blankets ’Round—I’ll Build Myself a Cabin on the Banks of Puget Sound”; “Jake Lannigan’s Wake”; “A Wine of Wizardry by George Sterling”; “The Last Hymn”; “The Prisoner at the Bar”; “The Selectmen of New England.” * * * Paraphrased Piffle My name is Captain Billy, And one night I asked her, If I could kiss her once or twice. She looked at me, And then I heard her softly coo— And say in French: “Oh, Billet-doux.”