Smokin'

One of my favorite bloggers mentioned today that she and her husband are smokers and it got me thinking about my former tobacco addiction.
Both of my parents were smokers. My earliest recollection about my father smoking was that his brand was Phillip Morris. The company had a signature ad campaign on radio and magazines and on early TV that featured a hotel bellboy with the characteristic chin-strapped pillbox hat worn at a jaunty angle. His name was Johnny and he could be heard across America shouting out, "Caaaaalllll for Philllipppp Morrrrrrrissss!" Besides offering a glimpse of big city hotel amenities, it was a catchy campaign. Years later, when my dad's older brother Joe retired to a mobile home park (don't dare call them trailers) in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., we were all amazed to discover the original "Johnny" was one of his neighbors. Apparently the gig didn't pay very well.
I think my mother smoked the occasional Phillip Morris too, but mostly I remember my dad as a smoker.
I remember him sitting at the kitchen table after meals and lighting up. There was no ashtray on the table, so he used his plate for an ashtray, stubbing out the butt among the egg yolk or mashed potatoes or whatever was left on the plate. Just to complete the image, I remember it being Fiestaware. That all seems desperately uncouth today, but my dad was raised on a farm and so was mom, so she never got on his case about it.
Given today's sensibilities, especially about smoking, most people would find such behavior horrifying.
Anyhow, by the time I was 8 or 9, my friends Jack and Bill would occasionally involve me in their clandestine forays into cigarette smoking with cigarettes they had filched from their parents. (This was in the 1950s and just about everybody smoked.)
But I didn't pick up the habit until around my sophomore year of high school when I took it up during a road trip to Terre Haute with friends to see the Dave Brubeck Quartet in concert at what was then Indiana State Teachers College. I started with Salem, which was convenient because that's what my mother was smoking by then. Dad had long since transitioned to Winston.
By the time I got to college, I was smoking a pack of mainly Salem or Winston every couple of days. Sometime during my freshman year, Jim West - my neighbor in the dorm - got me converted to Viceroy. He wasn't really trying to change my brand allegiance - he just always seemed to have plenty when I ran out of my brand.
When I got into the newspaper business I found myself among hardcore smokers. A blue haze of cigarette smoke hung in the air of the City Room and almost everyone had a cigarette in his mouth or burning in an ashtray all the time. I remember the custodial staff changing acoustic ceiling tiles occasionally and being shocked at how the new, white tiles stood out in sharp relief against the yellow, tar and nicotine-coated tiles.
By this time, I was up to three packs a day. My first conscious act every morning was to reach for cigarettes and lighter on the bedside table and fire one up on the way to the bathroom. Likewise, the last thing I did every night was stub out that last smoke in the bedside table ashtray.
Sometime around 1969 or so, I got the psychological leverage on myself to actually quit and I stayed quit until an emotional crisis about three years later.
I quit for keeps around 1979. Naturally, my metabolism changed and I gained 40-50 pounds, some of which I manage to lose and gain from year to year.
I had a relatively easy time quitting the last time because I did it in the context of a Transcendental Meditation Sidhi course at Maharishi International University (now the Maharishi School of Management) in Fairfield, Ia. I was in an environment where nobody smoked, I had no access to cigarettes and I was spending several hours a day in meditation. I took about 40 rolls of Certs breath mints with me and, by the time the two-week course was over, all desire for a smoke was gone.
Even so, for several years afterward I had occasional dreams in which I went back to smoking. I'd invariably awake with a start and the horrible fear that I had actually started smoking again. It's a very powerful addiction and I believe the researchers when they say it gets a stronger grip on you than does cocaine.
As a footnote, my dad was about my age when he lost his voice to cancer of the larnyx that his oncologist said was almost certainly a consequence of smoking.