Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #45 — page 8: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This page from *Whiz Bang* contains a humorous anecdote about Prohibition-era bootlegging in Portland. The narrator describes visiting a speakeasy operator on lower Washington Street who sells illegally distilled whiskey. The bootlegger boasts about his product's quality—twice-distilled, charcoal-filtered, aged six weeks—and notes how prices have fallen from $35 per gallon during early Prohibition to $10 now, expecting further drops. The satire mocks both the bootlegger's proud commercialism during Prohibition and the economic reality of black-market liquor: despite illegality, competition drives prices down and quality suffers. The bootlegger's dismissal of inferior Canadian imports adds regional humor. The piece implicitly critiques Prohibition's failure to eliminate drinking—it merely created a criminal enterprise—a common theme in 1920s satire.