Lighting a pipe in a car in the 1930s


Every once in a while I hear from some old-timer (that is, about my age) that young people don't know how to do stuff that they (the old-timers) simply took for granted in their younger days. The example that I hear most often is driving a car with a clutch. But I never hear anyone say that they could light a pipe while driving a car back in the 1930s - that had to be impressive.

I really don't know when cigarette lighters became standard equipment in cars (if you do, let me know and I'll update this post), but they really wouldn't have been of much help in lighting a pipe, since they were just a little heated coil that you would hold up to the end of a cigarette, or even a cigar.

As I look at this photo of a gentleman standing next to his car in the 1930s in Phoenix, I'll tell you what I know. I don't know if he smoked, and if he did if he smoked a pipe, but it was very probable that he did. A couple of things that I'm certain about here is that the car didn't have an automatic transmission, and it didn't have power steering. So he had to put some effort into steering, and also use one hand to steer, and the other to shift. And that doesn't leave a lot of room for lighting matches, and pipes, but people did it.

I suppose that smoking a pipe in a car got to be too much trouble, and most people switched over to cigarettes while they drove. When I was a kid, back in the '60s and '70s, just about all grownups smoked. Cars had ashtrays, lots of them, built in. And of course cigarette lighters. I suppose that you could argue that cigarette lighters were safety devices - it sure was a lot safer than if someone were trying to strike a match, light a cigarette, and then put the match out.

So that's how it works, one generation forgets how much a previous generation had to know, and took for granted. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
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