Up in Smoke

Edward R. Murrow died at age 57 of lung cancer. He was said to have smoked 60 cigarettes a day.

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette

Puff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to death

Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate

That you hates to make him wait

But you just gotta have another cigarette

                                            -- Tex Williams 1947

In my early teens, I wanted to be everything that my parents were not. Not because I didn't love them, although I had no idea what love meant, it was because I believed that they were "out of it." They were not in any way, shape or form, cool. For one thing, they were older than most parents, and their greying hair didn't help matters. And they didn't smoke cigarettes.

Shaped like a straw to suck a drink out of a bottle, glass or paper cup, cigarettes are more fulsome, generously packed with small bits of brown tobacco wrapped in a special white paper that burns slowly when lit by fire. The smoker draws in with his or her breath to ignite the paper and tobacco, then fully inhales fumes from the burn into their lungs, finally releasing the vapor through the mouth and/or nose into the ambient air leaving an unpleasant, stale, penetrating odor.

Cigarettes were advertised on television, radio, in newspapers and magazines as cool and refreshing, fine tobacco, filter-tipped for smooth enjoyment. One brand called Virginia Slims even targeted women with the slogan: "You've come a long way, baby." Stay trim. Smoke a Slim (my words).

Cigarette slogans became mantras in our heads. "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." "I'd rather fight than switch." "I'd walk a mile for a Camel."

TV was new and many family programs were sponsored by cigarette brands, like Old Gold, Pall Malls, Kents and Lucky Strike. "Remember, LSMFT, Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco." That was the sign-off for one of my favorite TV programs, The Jack Benny Show. I believe it aired Sunday evenings before the popular Ed Sullivan Show. Jack Benny, with his dry wit, was one of the funniest guys on television.

I can't recall Jack or Ed puffing on cigarettes, but they were surrounded by smoke. 

Edward R. Murrow, one of the most revered broadcast journalists in the country, always had a lighted cigarette between his fingers, especially when he interviewed celebrities in their homes on his Person-to-Person television show. He sat at the front of the screen asking questions and posing with a cig, while smoke curled and trailed upward like a semi-transparent snake. It seemed as natural as a glass of milk.

My godmother, Myrt Hunter, smoked Pall Malls that came in a dark red package. Their slogan, delivered in a deep baritone voice off-camera, was "Outstanding, and they are mild." Myrt and my mother, Dorothy, were best friends. I never had living grandparents. Myrt was the closest person to a grandparent that I knew. I don't believe my mother ever touched a cigarette and I could not imagine that she had.

"Did you ever smoke?" I asked her. "I tried it and didn't like it," she said. My dad said the same thing. It appeared so pleasurable I couldn't understand why they passed up this simple luxury.

Single, and a working woman, Myrt visited us often, arriving at our house in her light-blue '53 Ford, which she promised to let me borrow when I was old enough to take girls on dates. Her idea. She always brought a package of M&M's for me and my sister, Mimi. She placed her package of Pall Malls on our kitchen table and my mother would find an ashtray to set down next to Myrt's pack. She lit her smokes with a metal lighter, using her thumb to spark the flame and to close the silver lid with a nice click. Smoking seemed very ritualistic.

I started smoking at 14. I had been dying to try it. It looked so cool and lot of the older guys in my neighborhood smoked. Some folded their packs into the short sleeve of a white T-shirt. There weren't many colored T-shirts, always white, which made a good contrast with their blue jeans or Levis. Some pedaled bikes with high handle bars called risers. For the most part they were considered hoods or bads, as in "There goes a group of bads."  When walking or hanging out, they wore wide-corduroy tan coats, black shoes and white socks. You knew there was a pack of weeds in that corduroy coat.

My best friend Paul Greene and I purchased our cigarettes from a machine for around 15-cents for a pack of 20. We hid the pack in the back of the juke box at Carl's Donuts on Holt Avenue about a block from St. Joseph's. That was before school. When we returned after track practice, we had a package of smokes waiting for us. We didn't smoke the whole pack. We took one or two and left the remainder for next time.

Yes, we were young jocks and we smoked. Besides the coolness of it, the clandestine edginess of smoking was a big part of the thrill. We smoked on the sly, typically at the Pom Lanes Bowling Alley, where we met girls. Most of the girls did not smoke, but by senior year, many of them were puffing away. We smoked together in the parking lot at the Hull House at night following school dances or football games. It's a sweet memory.

Paul and I were still smoking, even while we were members of the football team. We had to keep it on the down low because the team would frown on it, especially the coaches. I started surfing with small group of guys during high school. Some of us enjoyed lighting up on the beach following a session in the water. We called cigs frajos.

As far as brands, I played the field. I tried them all -- mentholated Salems and Kools to the trick filters of Tareytons and Parliaments (which the girls liked). I coughed and gagged on Camels and Pall Malls and eventually settled on Marlboros, or "boros," which were middle-of-the-road in strength and flavor, despite the macho Western image.

During those years while I was still living with my parents, I really only smoked as a social thing, not daily. But once I arrived as a freshman at UC Santa Barbara in a dorm with a roommate who smoked, I started to puff on those coffin nails day and night. I once got down to my last dollar and spent it on cigarettes instead of food. I considered myself somewhat of a French existentialist, a fan of Albert Camus, always seen with a burning cigarette in his hand. I studied French and longed to smoke a Gitane, the most popular French brand.

While affording me the sought-after identity of angst, cigarettes interfered with any athletic goals I may have had. The track coach saw me running hurdles for fun and show-off at the field and asked me to come out for the team. "I'll have you running the intermediates in the low 50s," he said. Even if that were possible, I couldn't imagine the physical work involved. I would need to quit smoking which I didn't want to do.

Maybe it was a form of self-punishment. In any case, it became an addiction. I was not addicted to booze. I didn't drink alcohol. I was addicted to nicotine. Nicotine and caffeine were my drugs of choice. I enjoyed the rush. I realized later, that I also like to have something to do with my fidgety hands. Cigarettes kept them busy.

In 1969, following decades of unregulated advertising of cigarettes, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) finally required that tobacco companies print a warning on cigarette packages that Smoking is Dangerous to Your Health. The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act also banned cigarette advertising on broadcast media -- television and radio. Tobacco advertising in print media continued for years. Fast forward to current times, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), nearly 500,000 people a year die from smoking or exposure to second-hand smoke.

I quit smoking cigarettes years ago. I don’t know exactly when. It was very difficult to stop and a long process. As Mark Twain remarked: "Giving up smoking is easy. I've done it a thousand times." As a young man in moments of stress, I smoked. Most important, especially with two young daughters in the house, I did finally quit. Having not touched a cigarette in years, on a trip to France in 1999, I purchased a package of Gitanes and smoked a few. Meh. I'll pass, especially knowing the health risks.

It was my good fortune that my parents, who lived into their 90s, did not smoke and our house was not filled with second-hand smoke, except for those evenings when Myrt sat leisurely in our kitchen with her Pall Malls. She passed away when I was 14 about the same time I had just started to smoke. She was in her late 40s. I'm sure her addiction to tobacco contributed to her premature death. I think about her '53 Ford and how fun that would have been for both of us.