Sometimes I think pipe smokers before the 1970s were less stressed about pipe smoking than us pipe smokers of today. (And, I’ll readily admit that that time frame is arbitrary, based on nothing more than I started smoking a pipe in 1972.)
Why? When sitting back and recalling conversations with older pipe smokers, they all had maybe 3 or 4 different pipes that they would occasionally rotate. They mostly would have laughed if someone suggested they needed even one pipe for every day of the week much less if someone would have said the needed a different pipe for each time they smoked during the day. Most of the common pipe smokers I knew just didn’t worry about how many times they smoked the same pipe during the day.
My grandfather had maybe 4 pipes that I remembered. One was a mini-pipe he took to work with him and smoked throughout the day when he had 15 minutes. Another pipe he carried with him on the bus rides to and from work because it was bigger and lasted longer. (This was back when smoking was allowed on city buses in SE Texas). He smoked those same two pipes multiple times throughout the day without worry about burn-outs or damaging the briar.
He also had two other pipes he kept at home that he would randomly smoke. I couldn’t tell you how he selected which pipe but I do remember seeing him smoking a pipe and cleaning out the ash and then reloading it and lighting it again.
PawPaw, as we called him, died in 1978, but I still have a Yello-Bole Imported Briar Spartan that he smoked. I was given it and a miniature Whitehall that I gave to one of my sons. Both of those pipes still get smoked occasionally.
My point is, from my first remembrance of him until his death, I don’t think he had more than 4 pipes at a time and he pretty much smoked the same tobacco all the time. Mainly he smoked George Washington. And when he couldn’t get it, he would smoke Carter Hall or whatever else the local drug store had. His favorite tobacco store was Walgreen’s and he lit his pipe with a Zippo lighter. And for the record, he liked his whiskey straight and neat.
Now just look at pipe smokers today. I have around 42 or 43 different pipes that I consider smokeable, 3 pipes that are just for display and 4 more that I am in the process of cleaning and restoring. I have briars and pearwood, I have clays, I have Meerschaums and at last count 5 different Missouri Meerschaum cobs. At times, I find myself looking at my pipe shelves trying to decided which one am I going to smoke next. And, deciding which pipe to smoke may be even easier than deciding which tobacco I’m going to smoke.
Pawpaw had just one tobacco because that was all he wanted. We weak-willed pipe smokers of today are like kids locked in a candy store overnight without adult supervision. We have a multitude of tobaccos to choose from sitting in our desks and pipe cabinets – or in some cases, our filing cabinets, footlockers, dressers, garage workbench and old camera bags where our spouses won’t stumble across them. If all tobacco products were taken off the market today, most of us would be able to continue smoking for 5 years. Some would not only have enough to smoke 20 or 30 years but would make a fortune on the black market selling what they have hoarded (I know of at least one pipe smoker who claims to have over 300 lbs. of tobacco.)
Now, I’m not as bad of some of you pipe smokers because I only have roughly 11 lbs. of tobacco on hand. That’s not a lot but I estimate that at my current rate of consumption, I could last maybe 4 years. It’s not all one blend either. I have a couple of tins that at one time was my “go-to” smoke. I haven’t touched them in 5 years. The sit in the bottom of a wood box, unopened, because I’ve moved on to other blends. I do that quite often – find a blend that I fall in love with and then move on to something different after smoking a tin. Eventually I will find myself opening a jar I’ve stashed away but like any good explorer, I keep exploring.
You see, I find myself occasionally seized by a fit of “tobacco acquisition disorder” and will find myself buying tobacco I don’t need while in search of the perfect smoke. Here’s a prime example. I went into a pipe shop looking for humidifier buttons and walked out with 4 ounces of bulk tobaccos. Two different types that were renamed by the shopkeeper. I bought them because they smelled good in the jar. And, because I am weak. And because I can go into a tobacconist and buy them.
I don’t know for sure if my grandfather ever visited an actual tobacconist. I don’t have any memories of a cigar and pipe shop in the small city where we lived at the time. What I do know is that he bought his pipes and tobaccos at drug stores and was probably limited to 5 or 6 choices of tobaccos. Even though there were hundreds of different pipe tobaccos for sell prior to 1970, he was limited by what the local stores stocked. That would hold true for even small locales where there was just a small general store that served the community – your choices were limited to what the shopkeeper stocked. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t a wide variety of pipe tobaccos available, it just means what pipe smokers could find was regionalized. Sort of like the beer industry before the 1960s – what beer you found was based on what the local brewery produced. You wouldn’t find Dixie Beer outside of Louisiana and Mississippi. You wouldn’t find Pearl or Lone Star outside of Texas, Louisiana & Oklahoma.
(Allow me to digress even more: I personally find another similarity between beer and pipe tobacco. That is that as small breweries were bought and sold, eventually the brands just disappeared. (Falstaff was at one time the #3 selling beer in the United States and it no longer exists, for example.) The same has happened to some of the old pipe tobacco blends like Revelation, Sugar Barrel, Field & Stream and many more that I’ve never heard of that were sold in the early to mid 20th century.)
The difference today is that we have the internet. With a modicum of computer literacy and a credit card, anyone can find and purchase the tobacco they want. We spend a lot of time thinking about pipe tobacco and pipes. We talk to friends about what they are smoking. We read thousands of tobacco reviews trying to make up our minds. We click the button and then we sit in anticipation of the package being delivered to our door. Then we repeat it as soon as someone asks, “Have you tried this one yet?”
© J. Gibson Creative Services 2017
