“HAW-W-W-W-W!” That sound can only mean one thing—that Bachelor of Artifice, Knight of Calamity and an alumnus of Doctor Merlin’s Camelot College for Conjurors is back to vex not only the Germans, but the Americans—the Ninth Pursuit Squadron in particular—as well. Yes it’s the marvel from Boonetown, Iowa himself—Lieutenant Phineas Pinkham!

The Boonetown Marvel started the argument in a Frog grog shop in Bar-Le-Duc. It was an argument having to do with the respective merits of two branches of the air service and the comparative risk attached to each. Phineas orated that the boys who went up under the rubber cows had a lead pipe cinch. Any old woman, he insisted, could climb into a laundry basket and be let up into the ozone by a wire cable. But he thinks differently when he finds himself dangling below one without a parachute and a pesky Fokker trying to shoot him down. It’s another whizzing “Phineas” whoop—from the pages of the August 1937 issue of Flying Aces, it’s “Swiss Wheeze” by Joe Archibald.

Everything that goes up must come down! When that derelict rubber cow went high-tailing up into the clouds, P. Pinkham quickly verified the fact that he wasn’t the deception that proved the rule. He also demonstrated that he certainly knew his Horace, even though he’d never studied Cicero. And that’s how a St. Bernard’s “ARF!” came to be translated into the Kaiser’s St. Mihiel “OOF!”

• Download “Swiss Wheeze” (August 1937, Flying Aces)