HAVE A SMOKE

IT WAS extremely easy for me to quit smoking in 1984. The doctor said, “Yes, pal, you’re having a heart attack,” and, later, “Do you smoke?”

“I used to,” I said, “but I quit.”

‘When was that?”

“About 20 minutes ago when you told me I was having a heart attack.”

This conversation was prior to my cigarette-free survival through the talents of a car enthusiast named Dr. Darel Benvenuti. I recalled all this recently when I stumbled on the following bit of art from the family collection.

This object is a bridge card, identified as Hand No. 14. Once you played the simulated bridge hand, you could turn the card over and see what bridge expert Milton C. Work would have done.

And, of course, like the elegant woman shown, you could light up a Lucky Strike—and advise your daughters to do the same. A series of 50 such cards came in “Lucky Strike Fifties,” the flat tins marketed back in the 1950s (and collectible today).

We’ve been perplexed what to get Grandma.

This advertisement has multiple potency to today’s collector: A famous actor/future president offers a holiday suggestion of the most un-P.C. sort.

I remember our kindly old family doctor in Cleveland—he made house calls—and he was a smoker. What’s more, others of his profession got involved in advertising cigarettes.

Well, I guess it’ll be Camels, then.

In retrospect, even worse, the advertising suggested that doctors were pushing health aspects of the habit. Amazing and, as a cultural observation, an embarrassment of the era.

Even car magazines bought into it. Of course, they ran cigarette ads; everyone did. In the 1950s, one car magazine ran an article on “breaking in” your new car, with observations on proper bedding of brakes, use of break-in oil and the like. I recall there was also advice along the lines of “If you don’t already smoke, this would be a good time to start.” Letting your car warm up while having a smoke was deemed just about perfect.

In one of several Road & Track articles seeking the definition of “sports car,” I made the profound—pre-heart-attack—comment that a sports car was one in which I never felt the desire to smoke. “It offers other more significant pleasures of a tactile nature.”

They weren’t necessarily the Good Old Days, nor the Bad Old Days. They were just different days. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2013