Cache Is Not At The Posted Coordinates
Mr. Toot is the mascot not only of the North Iowa Band Festival, but also for Mason City as a whole. His image has appeared on everything from T-Shirts to business cards to city light poles. Now his image also appears on the geocaching map just south of Mason City Iowa. Each of these puzzles will include a fact or story in theme with the art series. Some may also include a question or two for you to answer correctly to find the coordinates.
Interesting Facts
There is an interesting blooper in the Music Man. Captain Billy's Whiz Bang is immortalized in the lyrics to the song "Trouble" from Meredith Willson's The Music Man. "Is there 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?
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This was the start of Fawcett Publications. Capt Billy's Whiz Bang combined William Fawcett's military moniker with the nickname of a destructive World War I artillery shell. The earliest issues may have been mimeographed pamphlets, typed on a borrowed typewriter and peddled around Minneapolis by Captain Billy and his four sons. Few periodicals reflect the post-WWI cultural change in American life as well as the 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 1920's 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".
Now here is the point of the blooper. Above you can see the date of this magazine, October 1919 and it is Volume 1 No. 1. The story of the Music Man is in 1912, so there was no such thing as Capt Billy's Whiz Bang then.
Sidebar:
In 1977 CBS announced the company's acquisition of Fawcett Publications, one of the last family‐run publishing giants, for $50 million in cash. A CBS spokesman called the sale one of the largest cash transactions in publishing history.