The Word - Vol 114

Mar 02, 2025

Butt Out 🚭

There was a day when smoking a pipe, cigar or cigarette was commonplace, and perfectly acceptable in our society. Kids today would find it hard to believe that in almost every room in almost every house there was an ashtray. Ashtrays and cigarette lighters were a standard feature in cars and trucks. We even made clay ashtrays in grade school for our parents! People also smoked in the workplace. A coffee and a cigarette was not uncommon in the lunch room or at your desk. Even News Anchors, not to mention any names, (Tony Parsons), had an ashtray under the news desk, and most often a cigarette lit, waiting for a commercial break. As a matter of fact, the entire newsroom had old large tins, once used to hold reels of film, being used as ashtrays and would be overflowing with cigarette butts.

I can remember the desk of CKNW Sports Director, Al Davidson, was adorned with burn marks along the side of the top of the desk. Al would start smoking a cigarette, then put it down over the edge of the desk as he got busy on the typewriter. He’d forget about the cigarette, and it would burn its way across the top of the desk! Radio talk show legend Pat Burns had the same habit, but more often than not his cigarette would end up on his office carpet, making for an interesting pattern that you wouldn’t find in just any carpet store. “Yes, I’d like a 9x12 broadloom with the cigarette burn pattern, please!”

One of the more curious regulations of that era was the division of restaurants and airplanes with “Smoking” and “Non-Smoking” sections! Did we really think that we could escape the cloud of smoke in an enclosed space of a commercial airliner? The first 12 rows allowed smoking, but those in the other rows didn’t. Were those people in a bubble of some kind? The same rule applied to restaurants—at some point, there had to be the last table of smokers right next to the table of non-smokers!

It’s been a tough few decades for cigarette smokers. Slowly but surely, regulations crept into society forcing smokers to butt out. There are still smokers around—you can see them huddled outside office buildings and stores, no longer welcome to smoke inside. That in itself would have been reason enough for me to quit smoking. Or would it? It’s a tough thing to do, as smokers who have tried to quit will tell you. Usually, you would take a few cracks at it before you finally kicked the habit. As the old joke goes, “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.”

I finally quit smoking 48 years ago. I was a two-pack-a-day smoker, three packs on a party night. What helped me finally say I’d had enough came from my son, Ryan, who was three years old at the time. While I was sitting down in the living room, listening to some music, he came in with his own ashtray and pretended to smoke, just like his Dad. I realized I was setting the wrong kind of example and took what was left of my package, taped it shut, and threw it in the back of my Volkswagen Beetle. I thought if it was there, and I had a panic attack, I could at least have one more!

To help me quit, I did a lot of car washing, driveway washing, and house washing—anything to keep my hands wet. My thinking was, if I kept my hands wet, I’d be less likely to try and smoke a cigarette because it would get wet! And there was another incentive. A very dear friend of mine threatened that if I ever had as much as another puff of a cigarette, she’d hit me over the head with the porcelain umbrella stand that stood in the hallway. Now, that’s incentive!

The whole smoking phenomenon reminds me of the good old comedy routine by Bob Newhart. In the routine, he wonders what the phone call would have sounded like when Sir Walter Raleigh called back to the West Indies Company in England to tell them he was sending them a shipment of something called tobacco from the New World. They were a little skeptical of the expected shipment, not knowing what tobacco was or what you did with it. Newhart thought the conversation might have gone something like this: “What’s that, Walter? It’s a plant? What do you do with this plant, Walter? You put dried leaves of the tobacco plant in a piece of paper, roll it up, and then you put it between your lips? And then what do you do with it, Walter? You set fire to it? Hahaha, Really?”

We’ve seen many famous slogans over the years, like “I’d walk a mile for a Camel,” or “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” or “Come to Marlboro country,” but humorist Dave Barry observed, “Cigarette sales would drop to zero overnight if the warning on the package said ‘CIGARETTES CONTAIN FAT.’”

Till next week…
Wayne

vol 114 - photos