FILTER, FLAVOR, PACK OR BOX

There are at least a couple of things I've seen or read over the last few weeks that reminded me of my personal history with cigarettes. Not that the memories aren't firmly embedded and recalled in savant-like fashion (as are most of my recollections). Two things in particular have caused me to shake my head in amazement, grateful that my days as a smoker were short-lived, and 30 years ago.

First, there's that voyeur's delight, Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. I've run into that one while channel surfing, and have been rendered spellbound by the efforts of Dr. Drew Pinsky and staff to help a handful of addicted, C-List celebs, some of them having gone through Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, as well. It dawned on me while observing this reality show, that while these semi-well-known folks were trying to kick drugs, they were sucking on Marlboros and Newports like pixie sticks. Drugs do more harm, but ciggies will always get you in the end.

The second piece of information that slammed cigarettes back into my consciousness was this small fact: Prior to 1930, lung cancer was a rare occurrence in the United States. 13 words, no more, no less, but with the impact of a sledge hammer. 80 years ago, in 48 states, with half the population there is today, lung cancer wasn't near the killer tuberculosis was...or influenza. Today, there aren't too many of us who haven't known, worked with, loved or cared about at least four to five people who've been felled by this form of cancer. How did this happen?

Well, a brief history of advertising in America would be boring, but bear in mind that 1929-30 marked the true beginning of coast to coast network radio, as well as the birth of the talking motion picture. While the American Tobacco Company began sponsoring radio shows and hawking Lucky Strikes to men and women alike, movies focused on alluring couples, their romance smoldering like the cigarettes between their fingers, smoke curling above their heads as passion flamed in their eyes.

And so, a nation smoked. Through World War II, when soldiers C-ration kits always contained a pack of Camels. Through the early television years, when cigs were ubiquitous. Even during the 60's, after the landmark 1964 Surgeon General's report that concluded cigarette smoking could be hazardous to your health.

That's about where I came in. I was born into a household of smoke. My mother puffed Parliaments, my father championed Dual-Filter Tareytons. On Saturday mornings when we were little, my sister Lisa and I would open the door to our parents room to watch cartoons on TV. The smoke in that room hung in the air like the London fog Charles Dickens wrote about: floating, creeping, undulating like a poltergeist. It didn't stop us enjoying the black and white images of Alvin and The Chipmunks , but it's probably responsible for Lisa's life long battles with bronchitis, and my own desire to take up cigarettes full time, as soon as I was able to buy them without being asked when I was born.

Vin Scully once described the era better than I could. Setting up an anecdote about World Series games played in the afternoon, he said, simply, "...in those days, EVERYBODY smoked." When I was a boy, that was certainly true. Everybody in my house smoked, whether they were old enough, or not. Save Lisa, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, family friends. Everybody had a butt lit. The brands stand out in my mind because of the television advertising. To me, at that age, its as if the packs leapt off the screen. Uncle Henry smoked Pall Mall, "...longer, long lasting...and they are mild." His wife smoked Viceroy. Salems were apparently country fresh, otherwise, why would my Aunt Barbara puff on them? Winstons surely must taste good, like a cigarette should, lest my mother's friend Gladys be proven foolish. My first brother in law showed us his Larks, when asked (like The Beatles! They smoked Larks!), and my brothers' neighborhood friends took drag after drag off KOOLs...to be cool. Right?

On the TV, Garry Moore greeted guests with a lit Winston in hand, the habit having been formed when R.J. Reynolds Tobacco sponsored his shows. I'm not sure what brand was Johnny Carson's favorite, but he always had a cig going as he sat behind the Tonight Show desk. Hadn't this always been the way? In the 40's, long before my time, an announcer named Del Sharbutt would assure Jack Benny's Sunday night radio listeners that nine out of ten doctors agreed: "Smoke a Lucky (Strike)...to feel your level best!!"

Not just the ads, but the actors on TV cultivated the look you needed to become, undoubtedly, the coolest son of a bitch on two feet. That's why I always felt it was Robert Culp, not Bill Cosby who was coolest on I Spy. Culp would open the title sequence lighting up a Pall Mall Gold 100, then put his Ronson to the fuse of a bomb, which would explode and show us highlights of that evening's episode. Cos was the "Rhodes Scholar" and ground-breaking first Black leading actor on television, but let's face it: Culp got all the groovy chicks, man.*

And so, I smoked, legally, from age 18 to a month before I turned 20. I also read. I knew what cigarettes did. It seems like my teenage brain was hell bent on ignoring the fact that these things impaired your health and hooked you like a deep water marlin, flailing and wriggling, but eventually mounted on the wall of some pompous-ass.

There are few known photos of me smoking. One was with a date at a dance in 1978. She was snuggled into my right shoulder, while I sat in my disco-velvet vest, Windsor knotted tie, left elbow on the table, a Benson and Hedges Light 100 between my fingers, it's smoke coiling into a halo above us--although I can assure you nothing saintly happened that night. The girl got custody of the photo, and I'm glad it's gone.

On I went, through my first two years of college, puffing away. Getting ready for school meant showering, dressing, hopping into the car, then negating all that grooming by lighting up as soon as I turned the ignition.

How did I stop, you ask? When did it dawn on a teenager that I could be launching a life time of health maladies? It was the 70's, after all. Congress, to its everlasting credit, had banned cigarette ads on radio and TV, and since January of 1971, "...you could take Salem out of the country, but..." you couldn't advertise them over the air.

Regardless, the nicotine addicted militantly continued, sometimes imparting half-truths learned over years and years of exposure to those commercials.

"Cigarettes help your digestion after you eat," said a woman I worked with at the mall.

"If I couldn't smoke afterward, I wouldn't F--- , " said a friend's older brother, his nic-addiction having gone waaaay too far.

"Oh, I only smoke when I drink," many would say, like social smoking was something that could be done with no risk at all. The way we once thought passive smoke was harmless.

Three things happened that finally got me past growing up in a house full of smoke, and being mesmerized by slick advertising (it was Dick Gregory who said about Marlboro commercials, "Kids know they're not gonna get that horse...so they might as well do like the Cowboy"). A Long Beach State Professor named Peter Carr warned about our cultural addictions in his Folklore and Mythology lectures. He talked about lighting up a Lucky when he was a youngster (that had to have been a long time before--by 1978, he sported a Ben Franklin look). He said he coughed like crazy, got sick, and threw the pack away. He also cautioned about liquor, and urged us to unplug our TV's. He made sense, but he was talking to college sophomores. Somewhere in my 19-year-old brain, I equated giving up all that to being under the parents thumb, again. No smokes, no booze? NO TV??

It took the other two events to get me off the ciggies. One was a girl named Wilma, who, I was told, dug me, but not the smokes. No one in her family smoked. How could this be, I thought, raised as I was, and taught by TV that "Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch." That Frank and Sammy and Dean got plenty of "broads" with a song in their hearts, and a Chesterfield dangling from their lips. Wilma's cuteness factor became a huge part of my decision to stop, but what really sealed the deal was a Friday night with an old high school friend and his wife at their apartment. It was sparsely furnished, as the apartments of teen newlyweds often are, so I sat on the floor until 4 in the morning, puffing a full pack of Silva Thins, and a half pint of Seagrams 7. The next day, rising like only the youthful can after that kind of night, I went to my Alma mater to run a mile on the track. After coughing and sputtering through four laps like a '61 Volkswagen. I leaned forward, put my hands on my knees and wondered aloud, "what the hell am I doing?" I felt awful. And that was that. It was June 1, 1979. That's the day I quit smoking.

There were lapses. I tried a pipe later that year, but looked ridiculous and felt downright stupid. At one point, I would dangle an unlit ciggie from my lips, a la Baretta (Jesus! Some role model!). It worked, but drove college classmates nuts. "Why don't you just light that thing?" they'd ask. But I never did. After while,l I didn't even need that.

Addiction specialists will tell you of nicotine's power, and how it penetrates the brain. You wonder why smokers arch their back when non-smokers get on their case? That's the need for nicotine. When he was in his 20's, one of my brothers had a rough financial time between stints in the army. Not being able to buy his customary carton of KOOL Milds, he picked several of my mother's Parliament butts out of an ashtray, one afternoon, and snuck off to a spot under the elm tree in our back yard. He sat there in the shade, sucking on those lipstick-stained recessed filters like his life depended on it. 37 years later, a tank of oxygen and a length of tubing follows him every where he goes.

It's a different world, today. We are all well acquainted with the ills. Even without access to the airwaves, tobacco companies find way to hook teenagers, just like the old days. Make it cool, and they will follow. Don't be fooled. If the tobacco lobby could somehow get the advertising ban repealed, even in the face of the all too dangerous facts, TV and radio would belly-up to the money trough with no remorse. Joe Camel and his like would find fertile ground amongst those who weren't implored to "Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country" the first time around.

I didn't write this to wring hands, admonish friends to quit, or otherwise heckle smokers. It's simply my own story, belched forth like a puff, stirred by the sight of Heidi Fleiss and company in their televised struggle to clean up, while depending on another drug, with cork-tipped filters. The irony was too much to just sit by and watch.

BEFORE WE CONCLUDE...

* Regarding I Spy: Culp got all the chicks, and Cosby was essentially celibate--unless Nancy Wilson or Barbara McNair was the guest star. Such were the times. The sight of Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark holding hands on her 1968 NBC special sent at least one sponsor into a "white hot" rage, shall we say. As far as I Spy was concerned, I wondered what Cos would have done if Moms Mabley had been signed for a guest appearance? I'm sure Cos would rather have taken a crack at Joey Heatherton. I was only 8 at the time, but I sure as hell wanted to!!