My father smoked, my five uncles smoked, my neighborhood pals had fathers who smoked.
They all smoked cigarettes.
Some women smoked cigarettes but not many.
If they did smoke cigarettes you knew that they began smoking during the mid-1920s and that they were “Flappers.”
Flappers smoked, wore short dresses and danced the Charleston.
Cigarettes became popular during World War I as cigarette companies in a spate of ill-conceived patriotism sent millions of free cigarettes “over there” to the American doughboys.
Maybe they did know what they were doing.
Anyhow, if you were a guy and were born around the turn of the century (1900) you smoked cigarettes.
Born prior to 1900, say, 1880 or earlier, you started smoking at age 15. A young man could choose cigars or a pipe as a symbol of maturity.
In my young years then, if the guy was elderly he smoked a cigar or a pipe.
My maternal grandfather smoked a cigar.
My paternal grandfather smoked a pipe.
Like my maternal granddad, cigar smokers didn’t always smoke them all the way down.
If the cigar went out they just kept the cold, stinking stub in their mouths.
“Stinking” was how I thought of the smell when I had to get into my grandfather’s brown Dodge sedan after he had smoked his Stogie down to a stub.
He was a wonderful grandfather but I’ve had an aversion to brown Dodge cars and cigars ever since.
Grandpa Keys always had a corn-cob pipe in his mouth.
I don’t remember him actually puffing on it but it did have its own smell; not pretty but certainly better than Grandpa Davies’ scent.
Grandpa Keys packed his corn cob pipe from a large, blue can of Granger pipe tobacco.
During this period every Hollywood actor and actress smoked cigarettes.
Bette Davis used hers as a baton between her two fingers in order to direct what everyone else in the room should be doing. But really suave actors like James Mason and Charles Boyer smoked pipes: not corn cobs.
Basil Rathbone played Sherlock Homes and always smoked a pipe with a curved stem. This was called a calabash.
He would take it out of his mouth to use it as a pointer. Movies with college-campus themes showed college guys all smoking pipes.
Having watched many movies before I went to college, one of the first things I bought was a pipe.
It had a light brown bowl and a shiny yellow stem.
It was beautiful.
I bought “Rum and Maple” pipe tobacco because while it glowed it had a deliciously sweet smell.
You had to “break-a-pipe-in” before you became a serious pipe smoker.
The first lighting was done with just a pinch of tobacco.
Adding additional pinches of tobacco in the next three or four light-ups was how pipes were broken in.
Once the pipe was broken in the smoker would take the tobacco pouch out of his tweed jacket, fill the bowl, tamp the tobacco in, light a match, touch the lit match to the tobacco in the bowl and begin sucking air into the glowing tobacco, down the stem and into his mouth.
Pipes could be smoked without inhaling.
The movie picture of Charles Boyer or of the college pipe smoker was one of assurance, health, a chiseled chin with the pipe pointed straight ahead (a metaphor for the young man’s future) with a ribbon of sweet-smelling smoke trailing behind his brisk stride while beautiful sweatered, plaid-skirted, saddle-shoed co-eds turned their heads at his passing with a sigh of adoration.
Not quite.
At least not for me.
First, although the tobacco did have a marvelous odor from the bowl, it burned my tongue something awful.
Second, in order to keep the fire glowing, the smoker has to continuously suck in the hot, tongue-burning smoke or the tobacco will go out.
Third, a straight, stemmed 4-inch pipe, its bowl filled to the brim, is somewhat heavy. The part of the stem which is held in the mouth is small and must be clenched tightly by the teeth making conversation impossible.
Even smiling is impossible.
There were two options, neither one palatable.
I tried pushing the pipe-stem back into my mouth to reduce the leverage only to discover that this clever device caused me to gag.
Else, I had to continuously hold the bowl with my right hand, which caused me to lose whatever suavity I thought I had. And besides, the tobacco, when lit caused the pipe bowl to get very hot.
It’s good to see that, for the most part, Hollywood’s good-guy image today is that of a pipe-less, cigar-less, cigarette-less idol. How often reality destroys the dream.
Pipe dreams.
