Everyone knows that I am not a man of great wealth.  The fact that I worked for 43 years for AT&T will tell you that I am not a man of considerable means.  But nonetheless I smoked cigarettes for 16 years, starting at age 16.  Finally I quit smoking cigarettes or, as my father put it, sucking cigarettes at age 32 in 1954.
It used to be that the cigarette companies had us all conned.  Every night, for 15 minutes we would listen to Fred Waring and his wonderful choir of Pennsylvanians.  Fred Waring’s program was sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes.  It was a case of the tobacco manufacturers of cigarettes trying to persuade us that they were benevolent fellows.
I was smoking at the time I joined the American Army and continued for quite a while thereafter.  During the Second World War, it is my recollection that at the PXs where soldiers bought their cigarettes, the cost was five cents a pack.  I’ll repeat: five cents a pack.  That low cost almost made it imperative that there was nothing to do but smoke a cigarette.
When the American troops reached Paris, it was widely reported – including the reports of Ernie Pyle – that they were identified as Americans because they were smoking Camel cigarettes.  On a soldier’s pay these days, it would be very difficult to sustain a modest smoking habit.
Here is the cost of cigarettes these days.  In New York, a package of cigarettes will cost you $12.50.  In New Jersey, the price is $8 per package.  In Illinois, the cost is $10.25, in Hawaii $9.73.  In Missouri, my home state, the cost of a package of cigarettes is $5.89.  At the bottom of the scale, there is West Virginia, which is $4.84.  Remember, these are the prices of one package of cigarettes – not a carton – just one package of cigarettes.  (Source: www.awl.com Nic Turiciano, Price of cigarettes by state, 2012)
In New York, where the price of a pack is $12.50, the cost of a single cigarette is 53 cents.  In New York, a carton of cigarettes would be $125.  So you can see why cigarette vendors keep their supplies locked up when customers appear.
Based on the foregoing prices, it would seem to me that only wealthy people could consume cigarettes.  The cost increase from World War II, for example, comes about because of increased taxation with the plain attempt to make the cost so excessive that people would stop using them.
I have not consumed cigarettes since 1954 so I had gotten out of date on what they might cost.  In 1951, I was part of a five-member bargaining team to deal with AT&T Long Lines on a new contract for its employees.  Even at AT&T, one of the most conservative companies, the people who made up the meeting room always left a few cigars and two or three packages of cigarettes.  There was an occasion when Vernon Bagnell, the Vice President of Personnel, cursed himself because he was indulging in “this filthy habit.”  If I had had the guts to do it, I would have challenged Mr. Bagnell for the two of us to stop smoking on that occasion.  But I did not do it.
At the time that people smoked, there were all kinds of accessories that made it easy to accommodate them.  For example, there was an ashtray which I received as a gift from the Swedish government that probably weighed somewhere between four and five pounds.  It was a beautiful sort of sculpture.  When I quit smoking, it went for naught.
During the years of my smoking, there were all kinds of accompaniments.  For example, the single best lighter in the whole world was the Zippo.  Zippos could be bought at the PX for about a dollar or a dollar and a half.  On the other end of the scale, there were lighters made by Ronson which were elegant.  They probably cost eight to ten dollars.  I recall one that had a cigarette lighter at the top and in the middle it opened up to conceal eight or ten cigarettes on the left-hand side and eight or ten on the right-hand side.  It made an elegant showpiece but in point of fact the cigarettes were removed from the original package and tended to lose freshness by the end of smoking the cigarette case.  The result would be harshness coming from stale cigarettes.
It appears now at age 90 that I must have escaped lung cancer, which is the bane of cigarette smoking.  As I said, I quit in 1954 but during the years when I smoked, there were plenty of burns on furniture and tablecloths and I do not ever wish to go back to that time.
There is one aspect of cigarettes having to do with advertising.  Every restaurant, for example, had its own match cover.  There were even those who collected match covers.  For a long while as my career at AT&T came to an end, I used to always take a match cover so I could remember the name of the restaurant and how much I was charged so that I could enter it on my expense account.  As you might imagine, I always brought home a collection of such match covers.  When I had saved a large number of match covers, I offered them to one of my grandsons who was then about 15 or 16 years old.  His mother intervened on the ground that the grandson might set fire to the whole house.  This would be self-defeating, for if the fire consumed the house, it would also consume the match covers.
I do not wish to make light of smoking.  Too many friends of mine in the end battled lung cancer.  It is a dreadful disease.  But in my own case, it appears that my quitting smoking in 1954 saved me from that ailment.
Now as for Vernon Bagnell, the Vice President of AT&T, he was the most dreadfully dull person I have ever known.  Bagnell had kept on smoking and in about 1957 he ran for a commuter train and suffered a heart attack.  But I always go easy on Vernon Bagnell because he is the guy who promoted me from a member of the union bargaining team to a management position.  Granted that the management position was about as low as one could get, but it was a management position nonetheless.  I regret that Vernon Bagnell was a casualty of heavy smoking.
But as the title suggests in this essay, it would take a man with much greater means than most of us have to keep on smoking at the rates published herein.  If I were a woman in search of a husband, I might look for a man with cigarette stains on his fingers and who has nicotine on his breath.  Such a man, once married, would probably not last very long, I believe.  The prospective bride might have to nurse him through his illness that would soon follow.  You must know that to smoke at the rates that are charged these days, one must be very affluent.  If rich widowhood is in her plans, this may be the thing to do.
Now at this rate I believe that I have told you all there is to say with respect to smoking.  I have been free of cigarettes for a good bit more than 50 years.  And I would not ever consider lighting up a cigarette.
 
There is one more consideration that now comes to mind.  There was a woman named Rita Snedicker who was the secretary to my boss.  On the day that I announced that I was no longer a smoker, Rita Snedicker  said it was her bed-rock belief that within a day or two I would be back smoking again.  That was in 1954.  Rita had all of the earmarks of a veteran smoker.  Her skin was wrinkled.  I had no inclination to cuddle up with old Rita.  But in point of fact, she disappeared from the scene and I can report that I no longer suck cigarettes, as my father said.
There are those of you who may recall an incident over the past four or five years when Mayor Bloomberg of New York decreed that there would be no more smoking in bars.  The bar owners said that this would put them out of business.   But as it turned out, no such thing has happened.  Patrons still patronize the bars.   The fact of the matter, as it turns out, is that the ban on smoking in bars has been a great success.  The bartenders and waitresses are not breathing in second-hand smoke.  I would say that we all owe a great debt of gratitude to Mayor Bloomberg.  Now, if he can do the same thing for the gun problem, he ought to be beatified.
This little essay came about as a result of my astonishment at the prices that are being paid for cigarettes these days.  With the drop in demand for cigarettes at these prices, my guess is that the cigarettes will be stale by the time they finally reach the consumer.  If so, that will be a boon to mankind.  But the fact of the matter is that it would take a much wealthier person than myself to smoke these days.  I am glad – even deliciously glad – that that [sic] period in my life has come to an end and that I am still hobbling around in my version of dancing.
 
E. E. CARR
January 30, 2013
Essay 746
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Kevin’s commentary: had no idea that Pop was a smoker for so long. I guess I thought it was just a wartime thing. I have a lighter or two of his but I never put two and two together that he was a long-time smoker.  Come to think of it, I don’t actually know if I was the grandson in question in the essay. I’m pretty sure I’m not, but it’s entirely possible that Spooky Suze intervened before I even got to see them.