CAPTAIN Billy Fawcett, editor of “Whiz Bang’ is no hifalutin guy, though his magazine has a hifalutin circulation. “I’m just a sort of country fellow who likes to go out among the boys,” he explained to a Record reporter today. Captain Billy ambled into Los Angeles with his wife recently to visit moviedom and have a good time in the Southland.
He’s good-looking and neat, though not. flashy, dresser. “Whiz Bang” has jumped in circulation from 5,0000 to 500,000 in a little more than two years and made its editor and publisher rich, but he doesn’t “put on the dog’ -he still keeps down close to earth among the On Main Street you’d pick him out as ‘a self-respecting average merchant, moderately successful, and a friendly sort of neighbor. You might take him for the superintendent of the First Methodist church’s thriving Sunday school. He’s that mild-looking–if you didn’t know him.
Not Even a Movie
Robbinsdale, Minn., is a funny sort of place for a peppy journal like “Whiz Bang” to be printed. It’s a village without a moving picture show not even a closed-up one.
There’s a church and a few stores, and it’s nice and quiet and respectable as you please. But it manufactures more jokes, with an edge on ’em and a disquieting way of looking two ways at once, than any other town in the United States. And once a month, the whole village is almost pressed into “‘Whiz Bang’s’ service, and the train stands down on the siding 37 minutes while they load 40,000 pounds of magazines into the mail coach. than 20,000 of these “Whiz Bangs” come to Los Angeles to be distributed by Egbert Brothers; more than 75,000 of them to the state.
“Whiz Bang” was started by Captain Billy shortly after he got out of the army following the close of the World War. It was full of jokes for sailors and soldiers. It made no pretenses at being ‘literary’, but it tried hard to “give the boys a kick in every line,” says the captain.
Five thousand copies were distributed in the first edition, and in the second month, 3,000. Then circulation began to climb and kept on climbing until it reached the half-million mark.
No Room for Ads
It carries little advertising. “I haven’t room for it in my 68 pages,’ Captain Billy explains.’ “It’s got to be most all reading matter or my subscribers will think they are getting stung.” Fawcett bought a farm at Pequot, Minnesota, 160 miles north of Robbinsdale, less than a year ago. He spends his summers on the farm except during press time. A day or so before the editions come off, the takes to his airplane and swoops down upon Robbinsdale to superintend the job of printing. and loading into the mail coach. He has five children and was formerly a reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune.
And before he met Katherine MacDonald yesterday at her studio, he had never seen a moving picture actress in the flesh.
He’s a Paradox
“I know little about pictures,” he said. “Never saw Mary Pickford on the screen. I think it was Lillian Gish I saw in ‘Way Down East’ once when I was in a city. I sat halfway through “The Four Horsemen” in Chicago. Yet if you want to find out what’s going on in Hollywood, they do say Captain Billy’s “‘Whiz Bang’ will put you wise as quick as the best of ’em.
-‘Whiz Bang’ Editor Here
By R.W. BOROUGH
Los Angeles Evening Post-Record
Los Angeles, California · Wednesday, October 05, 1921
The image at the top of the post features a portrait of W.H. Fawcett that hangs in the lobby of the Breezy Point Resort in Breezy Point, Minnesota.