Fawcett Publications

Fawcett Publications was an American publishing company launched in 1919 in Robbinsdale, Minnesota by Wilford H. "Captain Billy" Fawcett (1883-1940). A World War I Army captain, Fawcett had been a police reporter for the Minneapolis Journal before the war.

Captain Billy's Whiz Bang

In its early years, Fawcett's entire business was the bawdy cartoon and joke magazine, Captain Billy's Whiz Bang. The earliest issues, according to one account, were mimeographed pamphlets, typed on a borrowed typewriter and peddled around Minneapolis by Captain Billy and his four sons. However, in Captain Billy's version of his company's beginnings, he stated that when he began publishing in October, 1919, he ordered a print run of 5,000 copies because of a much lower printing bill in comparison with the rate for only a few hundred copies. Distributing free copies of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang to wounded veterans and his Minnesota friends, he then circulated the remaining copies to newsstands in hotels. The joke book caught on, and in 1921, he made the highly inflated claim that sales were "soaring to the million mark."

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The book Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals notes, "Few periodicals reflect the post-World War I cultural change in American life as well as Captain Billy?s Whiz Bang. To some people represented the decline of morality and the flaunting of sexual immodesty; to others it signified an increase in openness. For much of the 1920s, Captain Billy?s was the most prominent comic magazine in America with its mix of racy poetry and naughty jokes and puns, aimed at a small-town audience with pretensions of ?sophistication?."

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The title Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, which combined Fawcett's military moniker with the nickname of a destructive WWI artillery shell, is immortalized in the lyrics to the song "Trouble" from Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1962): "Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corncrib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang?" Yet this is an anachronism, since The Music Man takes place in River City, Iowa, during 1912, seven years before the magazine's premiere issue.

Related Topics:
Meredith Willson - The Music Man

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The magazine often featured a picture of Captain Billy in uniform along with the comment, "This magazine is edited by a Spanish-American and World War veteran and is dedicated to the Fighting Forces of the United States and Canada." With its 64-page, saddle-stitched, digest-size format, the humor publication soon saw a dramatic increase in sales. By 1923, the magazine had a circulation of 425,000 with profits soaring to $500,000 a year.

Related Topics:
Magazine - Spanish-American - World War

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