Pipe memories. Article ran in Binghamton Press on March 22, 2020

The Old Coot misses the whiff of pipe tobacco.

By Merlin Lessler

It is an era long gone, and for good reason, yet I miss it. Hadn’t thought about it for years but the other day I spotted a picture of Sylvester Stallone in an old news photo lighting a pipe. Oh my, how politically incorrect! A pipe? Not in this day and age!  Not a common sight. It hit me how much I miss being in a world with pipe smokers, letting that sweet, mellow aroma tickle my senses. And, hearing the tap, tap, tap as an indulger empties the ashes and unburned stubs of tobacco to rest the bowl until the next time it’s called into service.

Just seeing a pipe smoker with a briar protruding from the side of his mouth, a contented man, at peace with the world, would make my day. It was a male vice for the most part, yet women did puff on them as well. Not very many and rarely in public, though I recall a picture of Katharine Hepburn puffing on a briar back in the 1950’s.

I was fifteen when I bought my first pipe. It was attached to two tins of Raleigh Tobacco on display at a neighborhood grocery store on Vestal Avenue near Lincoln Elementary School.  The south side was peppered with little “mom & pop” stores. There were more than half a dozen on Vestal Avenue alone, between Rush Avenue and Mill Street. Even after Loblaws opened a “super” market at the intersection with Mitchell Avenue the neighborhood stores managed to stay solvent. It was an era of prosperity. The pipe & tobacco combo was a one-dollar holiday special. I bought it to give to my father for Christmas; he’d recently sworn off cigarette smoking, along with his five minutes of coughing every morning. I thought it would help him stay with the program. My mother said it would only get him started again, so I kept the pipe for myself. And, with a couple of like-minded knuckle-headed friends, walked around town puffing away, thinking how adult like we must look. A pipe was a nerdy thing to smoke, long before nerdy became a word, so we switched to cigarettes. Winston’s to be specific, probably because of their catchy advertising jingle, “Winston’s taste good like a cigarette should!”

Not the worst mistake I ever made, but right up there near the top. I took up the pipe again in my twenties, to get off the cancer sticks, as we called them, well before the Surgeon General got around to alerting the public to the dangers of cigarette smoking. The pipe did the job: I quit cigarettes, at least for a while, and eventually forever but I still remember how nice it felt to have a pipe protruding from the side of my mouth and to be enclosed in an aromatic cloud. I wasn’t alone; a lot of famous people were pipe smokers – Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, Darwin, Gerald Ford, Walter Cronkite, FDR, Einstein, Stalin, and Mark Twain to name a few.

Now, no one smokes them in public, not that I ever see. I miss it. But even more, I miss the sweet aroma of pipe tobacco. Almost as much as the scent of burning leaves on a crisp fall afternoon. When I turn eighty, which isn’t that far off, especially now that years slip past me at the speed of light, I’m going to buy a pipe and go in my back yard and put a match to it and to a small pile of leaves. If the authorities come charging in to stop me, they’ll have to pry, both the leaf rake and the briar pipe from my cold dead hands. Come join me at my house on November 15, 2022. We’ll light up the world together. Ha, Ha!