For those below a certain age it’s hard to fathom just how prevalent was smoking up until not too awfully long ago. Because there’s such a soci­etal sense of disgust for smoking, and with it some hysteria that any comment on the subject short of utter condemnation constitutes an irresponsible endorsement, some interesting sociology of twentieth-century life goes unexamined. Anyone who has a real relationship with smoking or with a smoker would do well to look at the place that the practice has held in Western culture pretty much back to 1492 when a Columbian expedition found tobacco growing in the West Indies and took some home, so that there was an appetite for the stuff already by the time European settlement began here in earnest.

Let it be said: a lot of people used to smoke cigarettes—also pipes, cigars or all three sequentially, depending on whim, ambience or time of day. In 1965 America, 52 percent of men and 34 percent of women smoked. The percentage of men then leveled off (it was down from about 70 percent during World War II), while that of women kept climbing as women’s place in soci­ety shifted in the late 1960s and smoking went from being “unla­dylike” to expressive of personal power. The ’65 numbers are from shortly after the first Surgeon General’s report on the subject, which while today is regarded as landmark, at the time was largely ignored. When the vague warning that “smoking may be hazardous to your health” did soon after appear on cigarette packaging, it was argued that just about any­thing can be hazardous given the right conditions. At any rate, that was my argument. When I was about twelve my grandmother presented me with a Zippo lighter so I would stop using hers, though she kept providing me with her Philip Morris Comman­ders, later Raleigh filters (with coupons on the pack), then finally Viceroys. Today she might well be arrested for giving tobacco to a minor, but then today she would be fully up to speed that neither one of us really ought to smoke.

In the days of my youth, every surface anyplace had an ashtray, and every well-appointed surface had a fine ashtray. When traveling between surfaces, there were little aluminum pocket ashtrays with a fold-out lip on which to rest your cigarette, and an ashtray on every door in the car. People who didn’t smoke kept a few diminutive ashtrays around their houses in the vain hopes of limiting the smoking activity because the thought of asking their guests to stand outside to indulge would have been shockingly impolite, but if some­body left a burn mark in the fur­niture it was considered as accidental as had they spilt their coffee. In those days one could smoke just about anywhere: of­fices, trains, planes, supermarkets, hospital corridors...even hospital rooms, unless an oxygen tank was in use, and that was negotiable. A friend and I were smoking in his hospital room as we watched Hank Aaron hit the home run that broke Babe Ruth’s record, so that would have been 1974. For the longest time, smoking was cool, sexy and debonair. Tobacco com­panies’ jingles and ad personalities are some of the most memorable, not only selling their product but perpetuating a certain stereotype of manliness via the steely-eyed Marlboro Man and such.

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