I bought my first pipe when I was 16, in a downtown tobacco shop
in Minneapolis, the kind of store that almost does not exist any
more. A kindly old fellow with gray hair combed straight back on
his head helped me select a flat-bowled shape called an apple,
relatively small, in a light straight-grained briar.
“It looks good with your face,” he said. He did not patronize me
or treat my shopping in his store as anything but a serious and
enjoyable encounter.
I do not have that pipe any more, but I have another very much
like it that I have owned for about 30 years. In 1988, I took my
own picture with that pipe in my mouth. I wore a button-down shirt
from Land’s End, my tie was pulled half loose over an unbuttoned
collar, and my arms were braced on my knees: Tough reporter on the
job.
I used it at the head of more than one column over the
years.
MY HIGH SCHOOL FRIEND Ray influenced that first purchase. Ray was a
type: He affected a roughened Irish manner, he was a gifted actor,
he drove a 57 Buick and he had a string of girlfriends. He
introduced me, in addition to pipe smoking, to Buddy Holly, Dylan
Thomas, and Bob Dylan.
Ray did not smoke very good tobacco, however (Holland House),
and I might have left pipes behind forever if I had not met another
friend, Sepp, in college, who showed me the Dunhill tobaccos. Sepp
had, in fact, devised one of his own blends at the Dunhill shop in
New York, denoted A16960. It was recorded by hand, in fountain pen,
in a giant Domesday Book in the Rockefeller Center shop.
I bought this excellent tobacco for years, but then, after an
interval, when I tried to get more of it in the 1980s, I found that
Dunhill had discarded the record of their custom blends. The giant
book was gone, the record of tobaccos blended for Groucho Marx,
Edward G. Robinson, Raymond Chandler, and Bing Crosby. I had
slipped into anachronism.
Also in my college years, by accident, I came across Connoisseur
Pipe Shop, stuck in a tiny storefront in the west forties. The sole
proprietor carved his own pipes, left them raw — no glazes or
varnish on the briar — and offered three categories of “seconds,”
meaning, pipes with some minute flaw: $10, $15, and $25.
I have been a customer of Connoisseur ever since, which you can
find today, a sole island of smoke in Bloomberg Manhattan, in the
basement level of a mid-town office building.
PIPE SMOKING TAKES a lot of work. You need not only a pipe and
tobacco, but a good dozen pipes more, so as to give each a time to
dry out after smoking. You need pipe cleaners by the bundle. You
need a piece of coathanger wire, for unstoppering clogged shanks.
You need a reamer, to scour out the excess carbon buildup inside
the bowl. When you leave the house, you must bring two pipes, a
tamper, a tobacco pouch, cleaners — and, oh yes, something to
light the pipe. Frequently.
Like many another pipe smoker, I got lazy. Throughout my
twenties and thirties, I smoked cigarettes. My pipes lay unused on
the shelf of a closet.
Then I met Sally, who, among many other things, introduced me to
tennis. After one gasping rally, I threw my cigarettes and lighter
away right there on the court, and haven’t smoked one since. That
was 1988.
But it’s a good thing I had good pipes, good pipe smoking
discipline, and a good tobacco stashed away. I have been smoking my
pipes since, without inhaling.
On my shelf today, I have 18 pipes. In them, I can read a
tactile history of my adult life. There is the squatty bulldog I
smoked at Fenway Park. There are the three or four pipes I bought
at about the time we moved to Boston, in 1990. There is the bent
apple I bought at Wilkie Sisters on Madison Avenue when I was in my
twenties. There are two or three oldies from the old days of
Connoisseur.
A few newer ones mark my discovery of Brookline News and Gift,
and my friend Mike’s riotous collection of old and defunct brands.
My pipes are darkened and colored by my fingers over 40 years, and
they have been seasoned by the tobaccos I have smoked.
Lexington Avenue today is all Gap and The Limited and Victoria’s
Secret. It used to be a borderline shabby boulevard of small
retailers, with haberdashers and tobacconists alternating block by
block up the forties and fifties.
I am still an anachronism. I can, at least in my own home, light
up an after-dinner pipe. Adult company inevitably says, “That
smells so good.” And “My dad used to smoke a pipe.”
