Cigarettes and Me

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s, I loved cigarettes. I knew all of the main brands and could sing all of the different commercial cigarette jingles. My parents both smoked at the time, my father preferring Viceroy and my mother puffing on Spring or Salem. Cigarette ads dominated television. In the opening Flatt and Scruggs theme for The Beverly Hillbillies, the “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” jingle was incorporated into its ending while Jethro would point to a Winston billboard ad (as he drove his family through town in their ancient jalopy).

I thought that cigarettes were so cool, not only the way they were packaged in their packs, but also the cigarettes themselves, with the tobacco on one end and the silky filter on the other, all finely wrapped in special paper. I enjoyed watching people on TV smoking cigarettes and studied how they would hold them in their hands and mouths. There was an entire culture to smoking, so it seemed to me. Smoking was something that you did when you got older, and as such I concluded that it was a “grown-up” thing to do. I couldn’t actually smoke, of course, so I had to be content with candy cigarettes instead.

But before I got old enough to begin smoking, my father flat-out quit cold turkey, never looking back. And then he persuaded my mother to quit (this took a few years). Both of my parents became strongly anti-smoking. As such, the earlier social conditioning I had undergone in favor of cigarettes dissipated before I had entered adolescence. I never started smoking and to this day at 52 years of age, have never taken as much as a single puff on a cigarette.

Others haven’t been as fortunate as me regarding cigarettes. Even with the ban on TV cigarette advertising in 1971, subsequent anti-smoking public information campaigns, and more and more restrictions placed on smoking in public places, that pro-cigarette cultural tradition still pervades our society to some extent. And nicotine addiction is very real and hard to kick.

It saddens me to see young people smoking. I wonder what they are thinking when they finally decide to light up. I had a friend my age with whom I went to school from the 2nd grade through high school graduation. Somewhere along the line he picked up the smoking habit and succumbed to lung cancer, dying ten years ago. What a tragedy that this big-hearted and extraordinarily talented soul would have gone so early in his life, and how sad that his family would be deprived of his presence for these and future years! Please, if you read this and aren’t already addicted to cigarettes, don’t start smoking! And if you are addicted to smoking, just know that it can be licked. I know. My father is a living testimony to that fact.