The Cigarette Horse Race
Social mores in my youth were truly radical compared to those of today.
After years of federal regulation, negative advertising and countless medical alerts, the dangers of smoking and later, the risks of vaping, have been at least conveyed to the public at large. Health risk is a required warning to be posted on every cigarette pack and proof of age is required to buy them.
But not so long ago, TV hosts and guests smoked profusely. Today, smoking is rarely seen on television.
I was raised in a family that accepted and regrettably, probably celebrated smoking in all forms.
Mom did not smoke, but all my uncles did. My dad smoked cigarettes, cigars and pipes. Both of my brothers smoked when they came home from military service, (brother Lou quit early in life ) and all three of my sisters smoked.
As ridiculous as it sounds now, cigarettes were included in the GI mess kit in World War II. My brother Ken mentioned several times, “If you did not smoke, you did not get a break.” The cigarettes were donated by major brands, and the mess kit cigarettes probably guaranteed a lot of buyer loyalty after the war.
I had inhaled a lot of second hand smoke by the time I was 12. For whatever reason, I never really had the desire to sneak cigarettes, even though there were a few young guys downtown that smoked openly. If I had latent plans to begin smoking they were curtailed by my dad being diagnosed with lung cancer, barely one year into his retirement at the age of 68.
My early home was, in some fashion, a temple of icons to the gods of nicotine. Dad accumulated souvenir ashtrays from a myriad of locations. In our living room stood at least one smoking stand. For those younger than boomers, a smoking stand was smoker furniture; usually one fancy pedestal, armchair height, with a large glass ashtray top. The stand normally would have a fancy handle so it could be moved from place to place. Some stands also contained pipe racks.
We also seemed to have a constant supply of felt pipe cleaners, that, like wire coat hangers, were valuable for all kinds of projects unrelated to their primary intention.
Dad also had several types of roll-your-own cigarette machines. The one I remember best resembled a large flip phone. The paper and tobacco, (Prince Albert, no less) were laid in the open device. Then it was closed firmly, reopened, and one professional looking cigarette appeared.
But the gadget that excited me to no end was the cigarette paper horse racing strips that my dad found somewhere.
The strips of thin tissue had track lines across the face. Each line represented a horse, and each horse had its own track. On the left side of the paper was the starting point. When a lit cigarette was touched to this point, sparks traveled across the paper to the finish line. The spark that got there first was of course the winning steed.
I would guess that a lot of impromptu races were generated by these strips in the bars and speakeasies of the early 1940’s.
As I was finishing this column, on a whim I Googled, “Cigarette paper horse race”, and incredibly, someone has original sheets of races from the era for bid on eBay. The description says advertising on the strips encourages buying war bonds. Pound for pound one might be able to buy a real horse cheaper than the eBay item.
Roy Hess Sr. is a retired teacher and businessman from Dawson.