Marlboro Country revisited

It was a way to be part of the cool kids…

I suppose I could have spelled that with a “K”, but that wasn’t our brand. We were Old Gold smokers, cutting across the high school back lot to catch few after-lunch drags up in Roger’s bedroom, then chomp a couple sticks of Double Mint before hightailing it back for fifth period class.

We did it ‘cuz that’s what the cool kids did.

For years after, we kept doing it because we were hooked.

It was a smokier time back then, and tobacco was just a small part of it. In our little town coal furnaces still belched black soot to smudge the January skies, Unregulated, ill carbureted autos scented the streets with a petro-chemical fug, and just down the road the city dump smoldered day and night. Still, we reveled in our clean country air, holding our noses at the industrial haze that blanketed any town big enough to boast city buses or more than one high school. Massive, pervasive uncontrolled combustion created an acrid atmospheric backdrop which made the respiratory impact of the occasional drag on an unfiltered Camel seem inconsequential at worst.

But indoors or out, it was a rare spot that was long unscented by tobacco. Dang near half the folks on the street had a pack of smokes tucked in pocket or purse. Tough guys chewed cigars, the smooth and sophisticated thoughtfully tamped briar pipes. Norwegian farmers were rarely without a lump of snus bulging a lower lip, and it was long-cut tobacco they chewed in the ballpark dugout --- bubble gum and sunflower seeds were for kids and the birds.

It was a tobacco friendly world I grew up in. Neither Mom nor Dad smoked, but our house stocked a ready store of ashtrays to accommodate friends and neighbors who did. Be it a tavern, diner, ball park or bowling alley, places of convivial gathering were invariably places where smokers gathered, lit up and enjoyed good company, generously sharing the smoke they’d bought and paid for with the freeloading non-smokers who got to enjoy it second hand.

As a little kid, that was me. About the only guaranteed smoke-free moments in my week were spent in a classroom drilling on phonics, penmanship and long division and in the church sanctuary being reminded of my multifarious shortcomings and their anticipated eternal implications. It wasn’t lost on me that as my solemn elders filed out of Sunday services their left hands were fumbling in their suit coats for a pack of Winstons while they grasped the preacker’s hand with their right.

Cigarettes, it seemed, were freedom. A deep drag and then, with chin uptilted and eyes at half-mast, all the moments ills, worries and troubles jetted away in a long-drawn exhalation. If  life was bad or life was good, tobacco made it better.

So for 35 cents and a little white lie to Obert Haugstad I purchased packs of OGs for my non-smoking dad, tucked them in my jacket pocket with a couple give-away books of matches and took my place as a man –er, boy – about town. I’d made it through the ninth grade, so really, what more was there for me and my buddies to learn? Who was to tell us we shouldn’t smoke? For our whole lives, hadn’t the world been telling us otherwise?

Over the years, the world has changed its tune. The air is clean … law and changing attitudes have seen to that. The current price of a single pack of smokes would pretty near buy a month’s supply for a pack-a-day smoker way back then, and the need to produce a 21-year-old ID would have put the kibosh on our buying ‘em at any price.

Still, when I catch the sharp tang of cigarette smoke on a quiet breeze or the cozy fug of a room where smokers gather the notion comes back – life is good, tobacco makes it better.

Too bad the damn stuff will kill ya.