"Gifts For The Smoker" is the ad theme, so Santa's puffing on his own cheroot. While a similar ad would probably be unthinkable today, it very likely didn't raise too many eyebrows in the 1960s.
It's kind of interesting seeing the different brands of cigars, such as R.G. Dun, Kings Club, Perfectos and Wolf Bros. Crooks. The cigarette brands are interesting too: Old Gold, Viceroy, Winston, Lucky Strike (Don Draper's client on Mad Men), Camels, Belair and Philip Morris.
What, no Salem (Dad's favorite)?
Dad hardly ever smoked. It was something he started while in the Army during World War II. If you smoked, you got a break – so naturally he took it up as a habit. But as for Dad smoking while I was growing up, it was only done in secret, such as when he took my brothers and me fishing. He wasn't fooling Mom though; the peppermints more or less gave him away. In later years, he probably smoked one cigarette a day, and not even the whole thing. And when he no longer drove, I was his enabler – buying him his Salems. One pack lasted him forever.
But let's get back to the ad.
I had to chuckle at Viceroy being one of the brands listed. I still remember the Wacky Package version: Vicejoy.
"Vicejoy's got the taste that rots" is the Wacky version of "Viceroy's got the taste that's right."
The rest of the Gray Drug ad comprises various pipe tobacco brands (such as Sir Walter Raleigh), the pipes themselves and various accessories, including pipe racks and humidors.
Grandpa Bumke (my Mom's dad) was a smoker. He smoked pipes, cigars (we ended up with a few of his cool cigar boxes) and cigarettes. He used one of those long cigarette holders like the Pink Panther.
Grandpa even had an ashtray stand in his living room that we used to fiddle with. (We had to entertain ourselves somehow when we visited.)
I guess it's not surprising that Grandpa was smoking when he sat for this portrait. It's how I remember him.
5 comments:
Smoking ads. Not gonna see those anytime soon. Not a bad thing. Such products kill millions a year. (https://ourworldindata.org/smoking). I know I don't miss it in restaurants and airplanes.
My dad was a heavy smoker. Started when he was 5 (!), he said, stealing "cheroots" from his dad's stash and cutting them in half. He quit, cold-turkey, at the age of 67, but after all the damage, it was a big factor in his death. I keep waiting for the results of 20 years of 2nd-hand smoke.
I never smoked tobacco, save for the occasional Swisher Sweet when playing poker with the boys. When we were little, Mum threatened us with making us eat the whole pack (and I believed she would've). As I grew older, it seemed like a way to make substantial amounts of money disappear, literally in a puff of smoke.
Sometimes, it's good to be a cheapskate.
I smoked a pack a day for twenty -five years; the Lord took the habit away in 1997, and I haven't had so much as a craving since.
I've had lung disease most of my life, aggravated no doubt by secondhand smoke from my parents and several years of my own smoking when I was young. I've been hospitalized several times, most recently in September with pneumonia. I also have severe kidney disease that was indirectly caused by the lung disease. My second wife died from lung cancer when she was 51. (I am happily remarried.)
Smoking is still a scourge, but thankfully not as much as when Santa came around sucking on a stogie.
I never got into smoking.Anytime I would get around someone who smoked I would get a headache. So why would I want to try and smoke and have a headache while doing it?I even get a headache when I smell weed on people.I can be driving down and pick up the scent of somebody smoking weed in a car in front of me.And since it's legal now,it's all over.The smell just makes me feel woozy and after awhile sick to my stomach.
I never smoked a cigarette in my life. Funny thing is, a woman I dated smoked Salems like my Dad, and I found that I liked the smell! (She quit cold turkey pretty early in our relationship though.) Like Don, I did puff on stogies (King Edward) for laughs and comedy effect only, with my buddies in high school and during college (at Columbus Clipper baseball games). But I've never smoked anything since, and that was more than 40 years ago.
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