Cigarettes, Whiskey & Wild, Wild Something, a Series -- SMOKIN'

Don't be frightened. That warning sign doesn't refer to this series I have embarked upon. These essays aren't really aimed at children, but they may actually prove to be cautionary tales for them.

There is something curious about the sign to the left. It is that word "Adults". That word appears on a number of things, Adult Bookstores, Adult Art Theaters, Adult Beverages and many other things that one could question if they are indeed that adult. Quite often they are rather juvenile, except juveniles are forbidden to share them.

Really, in truth, "Adults Only" is a frequently used euphemism for sin. Are things we make laws to protect our children from all that good for anyone? But once we slap that label upon something it becomes an enticement to those same children. If it is that forbidden, I want a taste. I can hardly wait until I am an adult so I can indulge and in many cases the child can't wait and ignores the sign and crosses over into the traps of such behavior. By the teens, those "Adult Only" activities become both a goal and the belief they really do consitute adulthood.

These are my stories of tripping those traps.

SMOKIN'

Smoking was de riguer in my childhood. People meeting people in social situations were more apt to be offered a smoke than a drink, not that a drink offer didn't follow regularly as well. It seemed almost everyone smoked, certainly all men. I grew up surrounded by smoke, especially if my parents had a get-together of friends. Our living room would disappear in the haze out of which floated voices and the clicking of ice in glasses. No one was concerned if children were in the room beyond an occasional warning that we were too young to smoke.

Yes, we heard it in school and in home and in church and here and about that we children shouldn't smoke. It would stunt our growth we were told. These myths of dire consequences were common threats used to drive us from our youthful desires. (If you mastrabate hair will grow in your palms; or worst, you'll go blind.")  When the child realizes these curses don't work, what then? Once you see a 6 foot 6 15-year-old chain smoking you pretty well discard that concern of stunted growth. (For some reason, when I was a boy, you were allowed to purchase cigarettes upon obtaining the age of 16. Currently it varies from state to state between the age or 18 and 21.)

When I was taken visiting there was scant a home not festooned with ashtrays. It just wasn't a practice easily escaped then. People smoked at work. People smoked in restaurants and bars. There were no separate "Smoking Sections". About the only places I remember smoking being banned was in theaters. You went to a movie and they sometimes even showed a card up on the screen during the previews telling you not to light up during the show. It wasn't a health concern; it was a fire hazard. No one wanted to risk a fire in a crowded theater.

While forbidden to the audience, smoking was pretty prevalent on the screen. Cowboys had a pouch hanging from their breast pocket and would occasionally pause between the shoot outs to roll a smoke. Hard-boiled private dicks and gangsters almost always had a fag between their lips. Even many of the glamorous female leads came out smokin', albeit with the use of a long cigarette holder as if distance made it more pure. In war movies some officer was always telling the troops to "smoke 'em, if you got 'em."

When TV came into popularity it just brought more smoke into the home. Jack Webb [ died age 62 of heart attack] couldn't dum de de dum his way through cases without a constant cig. Rod Serling [died age 50 of a heart attack] couldn't spin his way into the Twilight Zone without one either.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, were constantly pulling out a cigarette during the run of "I Love Lucy".  You could have called it, "I Love Phillip Morris", because Phillip Morris {and later, Chesterfield} Cigarettes were one
of their main sponsors. In fact, cigarette makers were the main sponsors of many of those 1950s TV shows.

As I noted, my home was a haven for smoke much of the time. We lived some of my boyhood years with my material grandparents. My grandfather had a few "adult" things in his life, among which was chewing tobacco and cigars.

He kept a pouch of Red Man Chewing Tobacco in the glove compartment of his car, an item he would offer to his friends when he came across them. I can clearly remember the Indian peering out from that compartment (we weren't using the term Native American in those days).

His real preference was for Phillies Cigars - Blunts. Many times he would call me over, hand
me some money and send me across the school ground to the gas station on the corner of Whiteland Avenue and the Lancaster Pike (Also known as the Lincoln Highway or Route 30).  I would purchase a breast-pocket sized pack and an Icicles Pop for myself (usually lime) and carry the Blunts back to him. He'd peel off the cigar band and stick it on my finger. I did this trip many times between the age of 8 and 12 and no one ever blinked at selling this young lad those big cigars.

The years my parents and I had homes of our own I escaped the smoke during much of the week. My mother didn't indulge and my dad was a long distance truck driver gone pretty much Monday through Friday.

However, my dad was a pipe smoker, so on the weekends or other brief times he got home the house would reek with his pipe. This habit did make it easier to buy Father's Day or Birthday presents for him. I would buy big, round 14-ounce tins of Half and Half, his preferred brand or on occasion, a new pipe.

In metal shop I forged a number of pipe holders for him that looked like shoes.

Many years later I was confronted by a mystery. I could clearly remember as a young child being given the two pennies wrapped behind the cellophane of cigarette packs. Cigarettes at the time cost 23 cents a pack and I suppose the machines only took quarters, so they put the two cents of change on the side of the product.

That was fine, pennies actually had value to a lad then. You could get a couple pieces of candy at
Zittle's for two cents. But where had the cigarettes come from? My grandfather smoked cigars and my dad smoked a pipe. His pipe was like an extension of his face. He was never without it. Neither my mother nor my grandmother smoked anything. Yet, I knew I had received those two pennies out of cigarette packs as a boy and I could see plainly in my mind those packs setting upon the dining room buffet, Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes.

Ah, Chesterfield, the smokes of the stars, or so it seemed. Their ads feathered movie stars and sports heroes, all with the ubiquitous white stick protruding from the side of their mouths. Even my baseball idol, Stan Musiel, appeared alongside Ted Williams praising the mildness of Chesterfields.

Lucky Strikes went for the sexy angle in their ads, sultry,
sophisticating, alluring enticements.

Nonetheless, where those cigarettes came from eluded my memory until my parents died in 2012. I brought home all the photo albums I could find in their

home and in one I found an old photograph of my father and I in the backyard. He is holding my hand, but there in his other hand I see it, a cigarette. Back before he took up the pipe he was a cigarette smoker and that was when I was very young indeed.

Now we have established that the 'forties and 'fifties were under a constant cloud of tobacco smog, we can ask the question was I puffing away behind the barn on my hobby horse?

I wasn't. My wife took up the practice before she was fourteen, but I had no desire toward the things as a kid. In my teens some of my friends were sneaking smokes out of their mother's purses or father's bureau. One time I was walking with two and they offered me a cigarette. I took it and immediately ate it and said, "delicious." I lied. It was not delicious at all. It was down right disgusting, but I was kind of a crazy guy then.

Despite what you might expect, it didn't make me sick or anything.

That was about as close as I got to cigarettes in my minor years. I was in my twenties, an actual adult, when I took up this adult pursuit. It was a matter of self-defense.

In the mid-1960s my wife and I had come together with a number of creative types, writers, musicians, poets, artists and actors. We began gathering together quiet often outside our day jobs. Our usual meeting place, besides hanging about nights in Rittenhouse Square, was at Jim Tweedy's basement in his home in South Philly. (Jim and I pictured left in 1967.) The room quickly filled with smoke and I discovered if I joined the others I wasn't bothered by the cloud so much.

I was never one to stop short on things. Once I spent an evening puffing along with the others I

went whole hog; in for a inch - in for a mile. In no time I was smoking cigarettes, cigars and various pipes. I was soon unsatisfied with being a part of the crowd as far as brands were concern. I had to be different, so I began smoking Sherman Cigarettes, a brand that I could not get locally at the time. I had to order them from New York. They were distinct in several ways. They were slimmer than your average cancer stick and longer. They were among the first, if not the first, to offer 100mm cigarettes, I think beating out Benson & Hedges introduction of the extra-long cigarettes in 1967. Sherman also offered different colored paper. I generally smoked the brown cigarettes.

With as much fervor as I threw myself into that smoky world, it didn't last long, perhaps two or three years. One day I was at work and it suddenly occurred to me that I had smoked no cigarette yet that day. I thought I should take a break and light up. (In those days we were still able to smoke at our work area. People had ashtrays on their desks.)  I sat down and took out a smoke and it dawned on me how silly this was. What was in this if I had to remind and force myself to do it? I really didn't get anything from the act and it was costing me money. It was costing me a lot because the Shermans were more expensive than the more well-known popular brands all my friends smoked.

So I stopped. Just like that I stopped cold turkey. I had no after-effects, no regrets, no jagged nerves or cravings. This kind of thing has proven common with me. For instance, more recently I had to give up coffee because of a medication I take. I was a longtime, heavy coffee drinker, but I stopped it cold turkey as well and suffered no ill-effect, no headaches, no quivers and no overwhelming craving to bash in a coffee machine for a few drops.  I guess I'm not the addictive type, at least not for things ingested in one form or another. This was one of the Adult Behaviors that didn't get its hook into me, and I never felt less adult because I gave up smoking. Cigarettes just didn't satisfy, despite what the ads claimed.

Photos near the top of this essay: On left from the 1920s is a family friend in the straw hat named Bill Hall sitting next to my mother as a young girl. On the right are friends of my parents who all got together Saturday nights in my teen years. The man smoking is Elmer Wilson, now deceased.

Greatest Job in the World

One early January day, when The Kid was 13, he took over the paper route his friend Ron had. Ron was going on to some other endeavor, of which The Old Goat has forgotten, but am certain he will remind us. The Kid even bought his bike because it had a basket.

The picture on the left was taken when The Kid was 11 and in the back yard of his grandparents where he lived. This was in town, despite the rather open field behind.

Actually, the field behind contained a large cinder pile.  It was for spreading on streets in winter snow. The neighborhood children use to race their bikes on that cinder pile and one time went door to door selling tickets to the neighbors to come watch.  A few actually did.

The bike he had then was rather battered. You can see the dents in the photo. (It was red, he had spray painted it.) In those years, The Kid created a new sport and called it the "Ditching Club". The rules were simple. Across from the field and cinder pile was the grade school he attended. There was a macadam playground behind the school with basketball nets at the edges. The members of the "Ditching Club" would ride around that macadam, but instead of a race, the object was to knock everyone else's bike over. The Kid was pretty good at doing this without getting dumped himself, but his bike did pay a price. He later removed the fenders from the bike. Bare wheels were cooler.

Ir might as well be mentioned he learned to roller skate on this same macadam. He got skates for his birthday. These were not the streamlined skates you see today. These had four wooden wheels mounted on a metal frame shaped like a slipper. Your heel slipped against a brace to the rear and then a clamp went about the toes of your shoe, which you tightened with a skate key. The macadam had a slight slope down from the school.  He had put on his skates and was struggling to stand, when some other kid shoved him backward down the slope. It was either skate or crash. He quickly learned to skate.

See, that was the way The Kid learned how to do new things, such as swimming. This early learning set a precedent, always an element of risk, always either do or die.

But I have digressed from what was the greatest job in the world.

Ron took The Kid along on his route a couple times and introduced him to his.customers. They all had one thing to say, "I hope you're half as good as Ron."  Ut oh, starting off with prejudice. Still, on a frosty January afternoon, The Kid solo'd, owner of own own route. Why did Ron pick January to retire? It was simple greed. He offered his route that past fall, but said he would do it until after Christmas and all the holiday tipping.

Now, when we said owner of his own route, that wasn't quite the truth. He didn't own the route. The Philadelphia Bulletin owned the route. In those days the Bulletin was The Paper. The Philadelphia Inquirer was the competitor, but it was in second place. Since that time the roles have reversed --well sort of. The Bulletin went out of business decades ago.

Once a month his manager would come to the house to collect. Newspapers cost a nickel for a daily, Monday through Saturday, and fifteen cents on Sunday. The Kid got a nickel for the Sunday papers. The dailies divied up this way, as far as The Old Goat can remember: one and a half cent to The Kid, one and a half cent to his manager (who collected from all the local newsboys). one cent to the trucker who delivered the bundles of papers and one cent to the newsstand owner where he picked them up after school. (The Sunday papers were dropped off by the truck right in front of his house, so perhaps the trucker and his manager split the remaining dime after he got his cut.) He had a hundred clients during the week and sixty-five for the Sunday edition.  That gave him a weekly pay of $12.25, if my math is correct.

Of course, earning it and collecting it can be two different things. Actually it wasn't much of a problem with most of his clients. There were a few where it was catch as catch can and one place where I am not sure he ever managed to collect. There never seemed to be anyone home. He would tap-tap-tap and rap-rap-rap upon their door many days and not a breath would sigh behind the portal, not a sou would make it into his hands. It was as if the place was deserted, although none of the papers he left ever piled up on the doormat. Perhaps squirrels toted them away to make their nests or the people in the place were vampires asleep in their coffins when he knocked. 

Whatever he missed from deadbeats, he made up in tips. He had a fortuitous failing. Ron had taught him how to fold the paper for throwing from his bike. Somehow The Kid couldn't master this basic skill.  He would fold the paper, but invariably upon chucking, it would pop open and scatter in the winter winds. This seemed a major setback, but God, probably chuckling at his incompetence, changed his fault into a blessing, as God is wont to do.

Because he couldn't toss papers properly, he would walk each delivery to the front door and place it either between storm door and inner door or upon the welcome mat. If it were a windy day, he would place the mat partially over the paper to prevent it sailing away. If it were storming with rain or snow, he would find a place to keep it dry.  There was once a customer who his called his house claiming he had not left the paper, but was surprised to learn The Kid had hid it in a safe place to protect it from a blizzard.  This inability he had to properly fold his wares led to compliments that he had surpassed his friend (sorry Ron) and to very nice tips. Soon he was making $18-$19-$20 dollars a week, even with the absences of slow- or no-payers.

You may not realize how much money that was to a 13 to 14 year old lad in the early fifties, but it was a small fortune. You could buy a meal consisting of a hamburger, french fries and a coke, plus tip for fifty cents. He was over twelve, so had to pay adult fare at the local movie house. A movie ticket, bag of popcorn and a box of Milkduds totaled sixty cents. Comic books were a dime. Paperback books cost 15 cents to a quarter. The Kid was rich!  (Consider, his first adult job paid $56 a week in 1959, and he had to work seven and a quarter hours a day, not just 7 hours a week.)

And he loved the job. Even in the blustery winter, he loved it, probably even more on days when the snow was deep and the wind raging. He would make his round, which probably covered about two miles out and back, imagining he was in the Alaskan wilderness, escaping wolves and claim jumpers. He was a character in some Jack London novel trying to survive the harshness of the frozen tundra.  Ah yes, that imagination he had honed living in the isolated swamp served him well on this job.

It could have been perfect, but like Adam and Eve there was a temptation in his garden he couldn't resist. He was at the age between innocence and raging hormones. There were these creatures called girls who were some how different from boys. He had always had some friends who were girls, but they were friends first, gender had gone unnoticed. Now he felt something intriguing about girls, a tingle when one was near. He had no clue what had changed. He really knew nothing about sex. This was the early 'fifties, people!  Sex wasn't dinner table conversation. On TV Lucy and Desi slept in separate beds. There was no cursing, let alone nudity, in movies. The best known men's magazine was Esquire, not Playboy. And he had never seen a naked girl.

Why were there boys and girls? What was different between them? Girls had long hair, boys had short. Boys wore pants, girls wore dresses (the early 'fifties, remember). Girls skipped rope and played Hopscotch and Jacks. Boys played King-of-the Hill, Kill the Man and Mumbly-Peg. But there was something else, something mysterious about our bodies and he wondered what that was.

There were "girlie" magazines for sale at the newsstand where he picked up his bundles. They were in the men's section along with "Argosy" and "Field and Stream", but on their own separate rack with a sign saying people his age couldn't buy them, or look at them, or touch them, or breath near them. But he pretended a sudden interest in hunting and fishing and in the process of flipping through outdoors magazines, he would slip a couple of the forbidden fruit under his shirt.

Then halfway through his route, he would pause at some desolate spot and gaze at the women in these magazines. It was always something of a letdown. Yes, the pages were filled with women, often posed in bikinis, and yes sometimes even --gulp, gasp - nude. But whenever a woman went au natural there was an inconvenient plant or post or pot in the way of those parts that most likely differed from his parts. (Yes, the 'fifties morality was even enforced in the girlie magazines.)

His quest continued. His thievery went on until the owner of the newsstand caught him one day. Waving his confiscated loot close to The Kid's face, the enraged man informed The Kid where he was going to put such magazines if he ever caught The Kid stealing again. It wasn't a comfortable thought and that ended his criminal career. He never stole again in his life. I wish I could say he never looked at another "girlie" magazine either, but that would be a lie.

Still, despite this sin, he wasn't banished completely from his Eden. He still continued doing the paper route and loving it. All things tend to end. In the spring of the next year his parents moved from town to a home in the country several miles to the north. There were no paper routes there for boys on bikes. There weren't all that many homes either.

And The Kid was thinking in those days that he would become a mailman when he grew up. Being a mail carrier must be the greatest job in the world. Walk around town twice a day (yes in those years the mail was delivered twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon), saying hi to people, enjoying the open air and freedom. 

The Old Goat recently spoke with a former mailman and it wasn't so free a job as The Kid imagined. "Have you ever heard the term, 'going postal' ?" he asked. "Now you know why." Okay, forget mailman as world's greatest job.

Anyway, much has changed. Mail comes once a day. The Philadelphia Bulletin is defunct. And I never see paper boys or girls on bikes. Now the papers come in the wee hours of the morning, chucked out of open car windows onto driveways by adults. They don't have to fold the paper for tossing, because each paper is in a thin plastic bag that makes for an easy throw. These papers are doubled bagged in bad weather to keep them dry, a precaution which often fails. In snows they get buried and hard to find. I wonder if they imagine they are driving sled dogs and passing igloos? Probably not.

Ah, such is progress.