After I wrote the last post, I had a sudden, sharp realization of how much people smoked when I was a kid! And I’m not talking just about Miss Nita and Aunt Betty. I’m talking about everywhere. Do you remember family vacations as a kid? We always stayed in a Holiday Inn or a Howard Johnson’s motel and the room always smelled funny. It was only years later that I realized it was stale cigarette smoke that gave the rooms that awful smell. My parents had smoked, but my mom gave it up before she got married. My dad smoked a pipe until he broke one of his teeth champing on the pipe stem. He gave it up. I remember how he always kept a toothpick in his mouth, in the exact same spot where he once kept his pipe. Whenever I did the wash I’d find bits of broken toothpicks since he’d leave them in his shirt pockets and forget about them. We were never without the obligatory box of toothpicks in the kitchen for him.
But smoking….we were strictly forbidden to smoke. I have never once smoked a cigarette. Never. Not once!
When I was 16, I took a job working for the Rosenzweig Insurance Agency in Floral Park. It was a wonderful job and a super office. Mr. Rosenzweig did not smoke and people were forbidden to smoke in his inner sanctum. But the rest of the office? It was like a chain-smoking convention. Those were the days when every desk in the office had a little ash tray that came with the pencil holder. Three of the women who sat in the open area where I worked smoked all day. You’d open the door to the office and this blue haze hung over the work area. Later on, when the first smoking laws went into effect, Mr. R asked the girls to smoke only in the break room. It was one small room in the back of the building next to the bathroom. We hung our coats on pegs on the wall above the file cabinets and ate our lunch at a small circular table.
One day I came home from work and my dad grabbed me by the collar and started sniffing, like a dog. “Have you been SMOKING?” he barked at me.
I must have looked amazed rather than guilty for he dropped his grip almost immediately. I said, “No, Dad, I would never touch the stuff.”
He continued sniffing. “Why do you stink like cigarettes?’
At that I had to laugh. “We keep our coats in the break room where the women smoke. My coat’s been hanging in the smoking room all day!”
Later on, another woman complained, so the girls had to take their cigs back into the alley and smoke outside. But I never forgot how funny it was when I told some young people at work one time about what it was like to work back in the early 1980’s. They couldn’t get over the fact that people could smoke at their desks!
When I went to high school in the 70’s I remember the teacher’s lounge always smelled of smoke and my band teacher was a chain smoker with all the mannerisms. On band trips there he’d be hanging outside the bus smoking a cigarette. In community college in the late 70’s we’d have student political meetings and go into the room, a blue fog, no one complained, but it was gagging. Nowadays working in smoke-free environment, it’s freakin’ strange to come upon someone lighting up that single cigarette that doesn’t have the nicotine oil imbued already.
LOL! It is funny that when you smoke you do not smell how awful it smells. I never did when I smoked many many years ago. Then when you don’t smoke you cannot hardy stand the smell that gets on people clothes and things.
I was taught mostly by nuns, and they did NOT chain smoke LOL! Isn’t it amazing how that aspect of life has changed in only a decade or two?
Thanks for this post, it reminded me to send an email to the facility my daughter is living in (she has huntingtons) to have them take her to see her doctor. When I visited her recently I had noticed a dark spot on her lower lip, which concerned me as she used to be a smoker. I forgot to mention it at the time, and I recently saw a TV show about a man who had cancer of his lower lip, and had re constructive surgery after they removed his lower lip.
Oh, yes, I too remember the day when teachers smoked pretty openly, even in the classroom sometimes. I also remember when smoking was allowed in movie theatres and we watched countless number of movies through that blue haze.
I also remember the various scenes in Now, Voyager where Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes at once and hands one off to Bette Davis — one of their final lines to each other as they decide not to continue their ill-fated romance is something like “let’s have a cigarette on it, shall we?”.
I thought it was the utter end in romance…~sigh~
Oddly enough, however, in spite of the fact my parents and siblings all smoked, I never smoked. For all that smoking was visually very sexy and sophisticated, I loathed the smell — loathed it growing up, loathe it now when I have to walk through doorways crowded with smokers hastily grabbing a fix.
It does stink, and the streets are now littered with cigarette butts from all the smokers who’ve been driven outdoors. Yuck.