Fawcett Publications
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Fawcett Publications was an American publishing company founded in 1919 in Robbinsdale, Minnesota by Wilford Hamilton "Captain Billy" Fawcett (1885-1940). At the age of 16, Fawcett ran away from home to join the Army, and the Spanish-American War took him to the Philippines. Back in Minnesota, he became a police reporter for the Minneapolis Journal. While a World War I Army captain, Fawcett's experience with the Army publication Stars and Stripes gave him the notion to get into publishing, and his bawdy cartoon and joke magazine, Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, became the launch pad for a vast publishing empire.
The title Captain Billy's Whiz Bang combined Fawcett's military moniker with the nickname of a destructive WWI artillery shell. According to one account, the earliest issues 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, he stated that when he began publishing in October, 1919, he ordered a print run of 5,000 copies because of the discount on a large order compared with rates for only several 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. With gags like, "AWOL means After Women or Liquor," the joke book caught on, and in 1921, Captain Billy made the highly inflated claim that his sales were "soaring to the million mark."
The book Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals notes:
Few periodicals reflect the post-WW I cultural change in American life as well as Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. To some people [it] 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’.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 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.
Captain Billy
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 $500,000 annual profits.
It is reputed that one of the humor pieces found in Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, titled "Al-Bar the Bubul Emir," was the inspiration for the 1953 Tin Pan Alley song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" by Jimmy Kennedy and Nat Simon. Such is the urban legend as spread on the Internet, but the original bawdy song, "Abdul the Bulbul Emir," as noted in Ed Cray's The Erotic Muse: American Bawdy Songs (1999), has been traced back to "Abdulla Bulbul Ameer," composed in Dublin by Percy French in 1877. The non-bawdy version can be found in Carl Sandburg's American Songbag (1927). Numerous artists did covers of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," including Edmundo Ros (1953), Radio Revellers (1953), Frankie Vaughan (1954), Caterina Valente (1954), The Four Lads (1954), Santo & Johnny (1962), The Residents (1976) and They Might Be Giants (1990).
Expansion
With the rising readership of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, Fawcett racked up more sales with Whiz Bang annuals, and in 1926, he launched a similar publication, Smokehouse Monthly. The popularity of Whiz Bang peaked during the 1920s. It continued into the 1930s, but circulation slowed as readers graduated to the more sophisticated humor of Esquire, founded in 1933. It had an influence on many other digest-size cartoon humor publications, including Charlie Jones Laugh Book, which was still being published during the 1950s.
Captain Billy's success as a publisher prompted him to create the Breezy Point Resort[3] on Pelican Lake in Breezy Point, Minnesota. Since celebrity visitors came to the resort, Captain Billy had the road from Breezy Point into Pequot Lakes blacktopped at his own expense. His building program at the Resort included the construction of a massive lodge, planned to accommodate 700 people, using native Norway pines, some 70 feet (21 m) in length. Celebrities who stayed at Breezy Point included Carole Lombard, Tom Mix and Clark Gable. The Fawcett House, Captain Billy's personal log mansion, is made available for public rental today. Decorated with elk and deer skins, Fawcett House[4] has ten bedrooms and eight baths. The living room has a cathedral ceiling, a loft, a bar and a large field rock fireplace.
Harry Truman was another Breezy Point guest. Edward McKim, a friend of Truman's since World War I, told of visits to the Resort in 1932 and Truman's success at the Breezy Point slot machine:
Captain Billy was quite a shot with a shotgun. He was on the American Olympic team at one time. He had some traps out there, so we did a little shooting with him. He had a couple of guests, one of whom was Dr. Joe Mayo, the son of Dr. Charlie Mayo. Dr. Joe was killed a few years later in an automobile accident. He was the brother of Dr. Chuck Mayo who just retired from the Mayo Foundation. We did a little trap shooting at that time, but we went up there almost every night for dinner. It was a 35 or 40-mile (64 km) drive. We stopped at a barber shop at Brainerd going up, and he hit the jackpot in a machine in the lower lobby of the hotel. Then he hit the jackpot up at Breezy Point the same night.
In some issues of Whiz Bang, Captain Billy wrote about his vacations in Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Paris, along with items about his celebrity friends, including Jack Dempsey, Sinclair Lewis and Ring Lardner.
During the 1930s, Fawcett and his sons established a line of magazines which eventually reached a combined circulation of ten million a month in newsstand sales. True Confessions alone had a circulation of two million a month. However, during the World War II paper shortages Fawcett folded 49 magazines and kept only 14. Magazines published by Fawcett over the decades included Battle Stories, Cavalier, Daring Detective, Dynamic Detective, Family Circle, Motion Picture, Movie Story, Rudder (later merged with Sea), Screen Secrets, Secrets, Triple-X Western and True. Woman's Day, added to the line-up in 1948, had a circulation of 6,500,000 by 1965.
The flagship of Fawcett magazines was Mechanix Illustrated. It began in the 1920s as Modern Mechanics and Inventions, was retitled Modern Mechanix and Inventions, shortened to Modern Mechanix and then altered to Mechanix Illustrated before it became Home Mechanix in 1984. Acquired by Time Inc., it was retitled yet again to become Today's Homeowner in 1993. The illustrator Norman Saunders became a Fawcett staffer in 1927 after doing some spot illustrations for Fawcett editor Weston "Westy" Farmer, and Saunder's first cover illustration was for the August, 1929 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. He continued to do covers for Fawcett into the 1930s, and when Fawcett opened Manhattan offices in 1934, Saunders and other staffers relocated in New York. Whiz Comics #2 (February 1940), the first appearance of Captain Marvel. Cover art by C. C. Beck.
Larry Eisinger, the workshop and science editor of Mechanix Illustrated, spearheaded the national "do-it-yourself" movement as the editor-in-chief of Fawcett's How-To book series and special interest magazines. He created Fawcett's Mechanix Illustrated Do-It-Yourself Encyclopedia and The Practical Handyman's Encyclopedia, which had combined sales of almost 20 million copies. In 1959 Electronics Illustrated was created for the hobbyist. It was merged into Mechanix Illustrated at the end of 1972.
After the huge growth during the early 1930s, Fawcett Publications relocated its offices to both New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut in the mid-1930s. Corporate headquarters was in Greenwich, and the book publishing division, known as Fawcett World Library, operated out of New York City, at 67 West 44th Street.
Wilford Fawcett's sons continued the expansion of the company after their father's death on February 7, 1940. That same year, the company launched Fawcett Comics, as recalled by circulation director Roscoe Kent Fawcett: "I was responsible, I feel, for Captain Marvel. I got us into the comic book business. I said, 'Give me a Superman, only have his other identity be a 10 or 12-year-old boy rather than a man.' I put Al Allard in charge of coordinating the project with some assistance from editorial director Ralph Daigh."
In 1939, Daigh put the project in the hands of Fawcett writer William Parker and Fawcett staff artist Charles Clarence Beck. The character they devised, Captain Marvel, was introduced in Whiz Comics #2 (February, 1940) and quickly caught on, moving into his own title, Captain Marvel Adventures, early in 1941. The success prompted spin-off characters, beginning with Captain Marvel, Jr. in 1941 and Mary Marvel in 1942. Fawcett's line of comics expanded with such colorful characters as Captain Midnight, Bulletman and Bulletgirl, Nyoka the Jungle Girl and Spy Smasher (who became Crime Smasher after WWII). The circulation of Captain Marvel Adventures continued to soar until it outsold Superman during the mid-1940s. Captain Marvel Jr. had such an impact on Elvis Presley that he borrowed the character's poses, hairstyle and lightning flash chest insignia, as described in Elaine Dundy's biography, Elvis and Gladys.