Death in the west!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQmpqvoEpws
We grew up around cigarettes our entire childhood! Both my mother and my father smoked and my father had done so since he was fifteen years old, beginning around 1927. Mom smoked Winston’s while dad was a Camel man tried and true. We remember sitting at the dining room table and watching them both light up after the evening meal and then dad would go into the living room and light up again while he read his evening newspaper or watched the evening news. We had no idea what second hand smoke was but we had been inhaling it since we were a baby. My brother began smoking at an early age and after he married at nineteen he would smoke at work or sneak around and do it because his new bride did not like cigarettes. It was one of the great moments of my life when my father quit smoking cold turkey after a stay in the hospital under oxygen in 1979. He had smoked for fifty three years! My mother, a beauty shop owner, continued to smoke after he quit. We would go into the bathroom and smell her smoke in there!
I could hardly wait to begin smoking and did so around the age of seventeen or eighteen. I smoked cigars, cigarettes, smoked a few pipes and even rolled my own with a rolling machine that I purchased at the local dime store. I tried chewing and snuff but simply could not tolerate the stuff. When we went away to college the smoking habit overtook us in a really big way. We would burn the midnight oil studying and smoking all at the same time. Bought them by the carton. They were relatively cheap back then before the sin taxes overtook them as the decades rolled by. We can remember waking up after a night of studying and seeing the ashtray just full of cigarette butts. All ours! And we remember the coughing fits that we had in the mornings as our body tried to rid itself of what we were doing to it.
We had a local bar that we frequented on a winking basis even before we were twenty one and beer and cigarettes went well together there. We would look out over the scene at the place and the haze of cigarette smoke hung in the air just like clouds in the sky. By the time I was twenty years old, I was smoking three packs of Winston’s a day! A little voice kept telling me that if I didn’t quit soon, I would not live to see the age of fifty. It all came to a head the night of finals week in the fall quarter of 1969. One night when I was pulling an all nighter in preparation for a day of exams I found myself curled up on the bed shaking like a leaf. I had been a nervous type of smoker anyway, but this was just an over the top event. On Christmas day night of 1969 I placed an unopened pack of cigarettes in my desk drawer and never smoked another one again in my entire life. Toward the end of my smoking career it had seemed that the only ones that had any taste to them were the ones immediately after a meal.
Quitting was a form of hell! For the longest time after I quit, I would have vivid dreams that I had smoked again as my body tried to trick my mind into convincing me to go back to my cigarette habit that it so craved. However, I held out and the dreams eventually started to fade as my body cleared the last of the habit from my lungs. Literature at the time stated that one needed to have stopped for at least five years for the lungs to return to their pre smoking state. But, there was still the problem of second hand smoke and we are reasonably sure that it dogged us for many years after we gave up the habit. We would go to restaurants and other public places and there they would be puffing away. The state of Illinois put an end to all of it a few years ago when they passed a law banning cigarette smoking in all public places. Bar and restaurant owners who served liquor threw a fit but the law went into effect anyway and we can tell a huge difference now in the places that we go.
We were a fairly passive non smoker until 1987 when we were a volunteer officer for the American Heart Association. We attended a meeting where there was a film shown about the Marlboro man called Death in the West. For those who do not remember, the Marlboro cigarette brand had this elaborate ad campaign built around the rugged cowboys of the western United States and how they so enjoyed their Marlboro cigarettes. This film had actual interviews with some of the actors in this campaign and their husky, cancer filled voices did more than twenty million anti cigarette ads could ever accomplish. The film was so powerful that Marlboro had a court injunction against the film but we saw a bootleg copy of it at our meeting that day in defiance of the law anyway. Parts of the film ended the interviews by telling the person’s name, age and when they had passed away of lung, throat or mouth cancer. None of them were even fifty years old! If you know where to look on You tube, you can find parts of that film there today.
We enjoy going over to the Marion Ministerial Alliance where we eat lunch and volunteer some of our time. The thing that grieves us more than anything else is the number of souls there who cannot seem to kick the cigarette habit. It seems to be one of the few “pleasures” that people in this socioeconomic class can afford, although at the prices of cigarettes these days we cannot understand how they do it and put food on the table at the same time. It is sad to see them huddled together outside of the alliance building on a cold and windy winter day just to take a few drags off of a cigarette butt. We have seen several die of the effects of smoking across our lifespan. It is never pretty at the end!
We saw a study released recently that stated that if one quit smoking before the age of thirty four, they could add a decade to their lives.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd_ascRZZo0
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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