[Copyright (C) 1991 by John H. Remmers]


                            PART I


In the 1960's, cigarettes were 35 cents a pack.  The Marlboro Man
was an almost certain accompaniment to an evening's tv watching,
as were jingles like "The secret's in the structure... Of Tempo's
all new filter...".

At that time, I was a graduate student at the University of
Michigan.  Smoking by both professors and students was common
practice in college classrooms.  In the Math Library on the third
floor of Angell Hall, the long study tables were furnished with
ash trays spaced at regular intervals so as to be within easy
reach of anyone seated there.  Above the tables hung a perpetual
haze of smoke that insinuated itself into the stacks, coating the
books and journals with its residue.

Indeed, smoke haze was everywhere:  restaurants, buses, airplanes,
public buildings of all descriptions.  The smell of tobacco smoke
permeated clothing, carpets, upholstery.

A different era, those days of smoke.  The health risks of smoking
were known but had not yet penetrated the public consciousness.
Smoking was a socially and legally accepted practice in most
places where people gathered to work or play.  Nor did I find this
bothersome, for in those days, I myself was a regular smoker of
cigarettes and cigars.  Four or five packs a day of Camels or Pall
Malls, no filters, and half a dozen Dutch Masters cigars or
Rum-Soaked Crooks.  Smoking was a way of life to me.

It was the darkest of times, the smokiest of times.


[to be continued]

4 responses total.

                            PART II

One of my professors, an Englishman, had the habit of smoking
during his lectures.  His brand was Players, a British import
noted for its strong Virginia tobacco flavor.  They came in a
stiff cardboard box hinged at the side, not the soft
shirt-pocket-size packs more common in the United States.

He had a little ritual that he followed before every class.  He'd
enter the room and walk up to the podium two or three minutes
early, take out a pack of Players, put it on the table, open it
and take out a cigarette, light up, and lean against the
blackboard smoking it and stare at the class, uttering not a word,
until it was time to begin.  Then, unfinished cigarette in the
left hand and chalk in the right, he would turn to the board and
start writing and talking.

The man was not among my favorite lecturers.  He mumbled
disjointedly, used technical terms that he hadn't defined, wrote
in a small and practically illegible hand, and passed from one
topic to the next with scarcely any visible or audible sign that
the subject had changed.  One came away from one of his lectures
feeling that matters deep and profound had probably been dealt
with, but having little idea what they were.

Such was my irritation with his teaching style that I always hoped
he'd mix up his props, stick the chalk in his mouth, and attempt
to write on the board with the cigarette.  But it never happened.

                             PART III


At the corner of Liberty and Division, where one now finds Liberty
Plaza, stood a row of buildings, among them was a little tobacco
shop run by a colorful old fellow named Sam.  The buildings were
demolished long ago -- I forget what most of them were -- but
Sam's place lingers on in my memory.

Sam's past is what the word "checkered" was invented to describe.
By his account, he'd done a little farming, a bit of door-to-door
vacuum cleaner salesmanship, newspaper reporting, and even a stint
in private investagation with the Pinkertons and law enforcement
with the Treasury Department during Prohibition, raiding
bootleggers' warehouses.  Rumor had it that prior to joining with
the law he'd been on the other side, doing some rum-running of his
own in the early 1920's.  Nobody quite knew why he'd switched
allegiance -- maybe he got religion, or maybe a woman had
something to do with it.  People liked to speculate, but Sam
himself would never confirm nor deny that he'd even *had* a
bootlegging career.

Except for that, Sam loved to talk about his past and would go on
and on about it to any customer willing to listen.  I was a
regular customer, more because of his fascinating stories than the
cigarettes he sold -- after all, I could've bought those
anywhere.  Nobody knew for sure whether or not his tales of past
exploits were true or not -- he had just shown up in Ann Arbor
some years before and started up this little retail business;
nobody here knew him from before.

I'm of the opinion that Sam's stories were a mixture of fact and
fiction, a kernel of truth considerably embroidered.  But that's
the way it's been with all great story-tellers from Homer on down,
and the beauty of his stories was all that mattered to me.

                             PART IV


I spent the summer of my twenty-first year holed up in a rented
beach cottage in Englewood, Florida, a little Gulf Coast town a
few miles south of Venice.  Nowadays Englewood is subsumed into
the crowded urban sprawl that extends from Fort Myers all the way
up past Tampa, but back then it was isolated and quiet, somewhere
you could escape to.  I chose it as a place to decompress after
four intense years of college.

Most of my days I spent alternating between lying out on the beach
reading John D. Macdonald novels and working in the kitchen of my
little hideaway, where I was assembling a stereo amplifier from a
kit I'd purchased at a hi-fi store up in St. Pete.  It was a
70-watt Eico, one of those pre-solid-state vacuum tube jobs that
weighed a ton and generated enough heat to warm Grand Central
Station in January.  Building stereo amplifiers was a popular
pastime among audiophiles in those days, affording rich
opportunities to develop and refine one's soldering skills.  I
wasn't into cooking at home, so it was no inconvenience to
dedicate the kitchen table as a workbench.  As a calming
influence and concentration aid, I'd generally be puffing away
constantly on a cigarette while at work on this project.

Evenings I'd stroll to a little greasy spoon seafood restaurant
just down the road for dinner and a few games of pinball.  Fried
shrimp or deep-fried clams were my usual entree choices, with a
side order of french fries.  Not exactly heart-smart, but I was
young and cholesterol hadn't been invented yet, so it was okay.

On days when I was feeling extravagant I'd have a martini or two
before dinner, and two or three cigarettes to go with, of course.
After dinner I'd sit out on the restaurant's balcony, sipping a
beer, smoking, and listening to the waves hitting the shore.

I still remember vividly the day I finished my Eico amplifier and
fired it up for the first time.  The other components were and
Acoustic Research turntable and a couple of large economy size
Jensen TR-3 speakers, which were considered pretty hot stuff in
those days but by comparison with modern speakers sounded like the
entire orchestra was covered in thick gauze padding.  But I was
real excited about it and for the premiere recording chose to to
play my favorite Sibelius work, his Second Symphony.  The
neighbors complained after a few minutes of that at full volume,
so I had to turn it down.

To the young folks of the 1990s who are reading this I am sure
that it sounds like a tale told by a demented, dissolute hermit
well on the road to self-destruction through consumption of
noxious substances.  But I assure you that the summer of my
twenty-first year was one of the most invigorating, renewing
periods of my entire life.  It was a time when I was in full
control of my choices; there was nobody to tell me I SHOULD be
doing this and I SHOULDN'T be doing that.  I did what I wanted,
without guilt.  The best of times.

During my subsequent sojourn in Ann Arbor I got a lot of use and
enjoyment out of that Eico, but around the mid-1970's decided it
was time to scale up a bit and purchased a Marantz receiver to
replace it.  Being the packrat that I am, I didn't throw out the
Eico, though.  It spent the next decade and a half neglected,
buried at the bottom of a basement closet.  At the time of a house
move a couple of years ago I decided it really was time to get rid
of it, but before putting the amplifier out for the junkman I
opened it up to have a last look at all those obsolete vacuum
tubes, rheostats, and condensers.  I'd never taken the top off in
all the years since I finished building it.  Much to my amazement,
I found amidst the complex wiring an empty, crumpled Pall Mall
pack.  I must have absent-mindedly dropped it there back in
Englewood, all those years ago.

Such a singular relic from one of the more treasured parts of my
past needed to be preserved.  I had the cigarette pack framed; it
hangs now on my study wall.

                           PART V


Do you remember trading stamps?  They were a popular retailing
gimmick in the 1960's.  Supermarkets would give them out -- a
certain number of stamps for every dollar's worth of items
purchased.  You'd paste the stamps in special books, and when you
filled up enough books, you'd take them to a redemption center and
trade them in for consumer items like toasters or glassware sets.
The idea was to encourage buying by making it seem like saving.
Trading stamps have disappeared.  Nowadays, people use the
ubiquitous credit card to write themselves loans and get the
toaster or glassware set right away.  The thrift mentality has
yielded to the psychology of instant gratification.

In 1966, my older sister Lois, a sociologist, married John, a
history professor at Antioch College, a small and highly regarded
liberal arts school in southwestern Ohio.  Lois worked at the
college as a counselor.  On occasional weekends I'd drive down
from Ann Arbor to visit them.  He was very much of a thrifty bent,
and both of them were heavy smokers.  So at John's urging they
both smoked Raleigh Cigarettes, a brand with a gimmick similar to
trading stamps.  Every pack of Raleigh's contained a coupon; when
you collected enough Raleigh coupons, you sent them off to a mail
order place in exchange for items (like toasters or glassware
sets) in the Raleigh catalog.

John really got into this -- it seemed like he was always talking
about all the things they were going to buy with their coupons.
Raleigh wasn't my regular brand -- for one thing, they had filters
on them -- but to be a good sport and partially repay them for
their hospitality, I'd purchase and smoke Raleighs when I visited
Lois and John and turn the coupons over to them.

For all the talk, I don't think they ever purchased much with the
coupons.  The problem was that it took an inordinately long time
to accumulate enough coupons to buy anything at all, even if one
consumed Raleighs at the rate of two packs a day (which they
did).  In fact, the only Raleigh catalog item that I can remember
ever showing up in their household was a teflon frying pan.  John
of course never let anyone forget that diligence at saving Raleigh
coupons was what had made the frying pan possible, but to put it
quite bluntly, it was a lousy frying pan.  Within a few months the
teflon coating had completely worn off and the inner surface of
the pan was covered with deep scratches that probably harbored all
manner of harmful bacteria.  Nonetheless, they continued to use
the pan for several years -- another aberrant manifestation of the
thrift mentality.  In terms of the health risks involved, this was
a very costly frying pan indeed.

Now, John was an excellent history professor, but I must say that
in the matter of the Raleigh coupons he showed a certain
vulnerability to popular fads and errors of reasoning.  This
taught me that academics are in many respects just folks like
everybody else when it comes to matters outside their specialty, a
humbling fact that I've tried to stay mindful of and that's proved
quite useful during my own academic career.

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