Young men smoking pipes


In a long life that spans over six decades now, something that I've never seen is a young man smoking a pipe. Pipes were still around when I was a kid, in the 1960s, but only old men used them. And this has started to puzzle me.

The ad at the top of this post, by the way, is from the Duke University site ROAD (Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions) and while their interest is historic advertising, mine is time-traveling. And usually I find that things remain pretty much the same, generation after generation, with only subtle changes like where people part their hair, how far up they wear their pants, that sort of thing. But tobacco use goes way back. And I mean way, way back because Native Americans were using it, in pipes, long before Europeans tried it, and liked it. In pipes, of course.

I've never used tobacco, but I know a lot of people who have, and most of them, born in the 20th Century, used it in premade rolled-up packages called "cigarettes". Cigarette is a miniature cigar, and I do remember the old guys smoking cigars when I was a kid, along with pipes, but while I'll hear someone mention cigars, like on Facebook, and even the use of water pipes (bongs) I'll be darned if I can think of anyone my age or younger who walks around with a pipe.


Whether she's just happy, or is laughing and pointing at how he's wearing his swimsuit, or at his pipe, I have no idea. My best guess at their ages would be early twenties, maybe even teenagers (people tended to look older in those days), and it would be difficult for me to image someone their age nowadays sitting on the beach with their pipe. Well, with a tobacco pipe, not any modern version.

Again, I'm not a tobacco user, but it seems to me that using a pipe would be a pretty economical way to smoke. Once you've paid for the pipe (or swiped it from grandpa when he wasn't looking), all you had to pay for would be the tobacco (which you could keep in the toe of a Persian slipper if nothing else), and some pipe cleaners. I wonder if they still make pipe cleaners? You know, I was so skinny as a kid I was told that I looked like I was made out of pipe cleaners...

But I digress. My point here is that it seems as if pipes worked perfectly well for young people from the first time someone decided to set fire to tobacco and draw it into their lungs until fairly recently, like about in my lifetime. I wonder why?

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