David Cohen illustration
It was my job to clean my father’s tobacco pipe—his Dr. Grabow Royal Duke. This straight-stemmed model had a rich briar bowl and, I thought, looked regal. My father had been a Camel cigarette smoker for years, and when I was around 10 he switched to a pipe and Prince Albert tobacco.
When he handed the pipe over for my care, I tapped the bowl against my palm, and with his pocket knife’s clip blade I gently scraped away the residue inside the bowl. Easing stem from shank, I pulled out the soggy brown filter and ran a pipe cleaner through the stem’s hole, then blew it like a whistle. A new filter in, stem back in shank, I packed the shiny bowl with tobacco. Then I handed the pipe to my father for his inspection.
The pipe in his grasp, its bit in his teeth, he lit the tobacco, puffed till it sizzled and smoke seeped from his mouth. One day after he tested the pipe, he handed it to me. I put the stem in my mouth and cupped the warm bowl in my hand. I puffed into the hole, careful not to inhale the pungent smoke. But I felt proud in my pretend smoking. I’m sure my mother would not have approved of this liberty my father granted me, but he and I were often partners in mischief.
My mother, though, seemed to enjoy my father’s period of pipe smoking. She once remarked, “A man who smokes a pipe seems relaxed.” I thought of Fred MacMurray, a pipe smoker and the most relaxed of television fathers on “My Three Sons.” I also thought about my uncle Paul, my father’s oldest brother, who smoked a pipe. When our family gathered on my grandmother’s front porch on Sunday afternoons, Paul—a tall, lean man who reminded me of Gary Cooper—settled in a chair at the far end of the porch, a pipe in his mouth. While the other men smoked cigarettes and vigorously talked politics, Paul sat and puffed his pipe, listening and chuckling lightly at something his brothers had said. Occasionally, he took the pipe stem from his mouth to speak a few words in his low, slow drawl, but mostly he listened.
Paul drove a cab for the Eagle Cab Company in my hometown Marion, North Carolina, and on Saturday mornings my mother and I often rode to town in his white sedan. In Paul’s cab there was a peaceful atmosphere. He held the steering wheel and smoked his pipe, making quiet conversation. I sat in the back seat beside my mother, savoring the car’s warmth and the aroma of Paul’s pipe smoke.
My father gave up his pipe after a few years and never went back to cigarettes. But my connection to pipe smoking didn’t end entirely. During my courtship with my husband, Steve, and in the early years of our marriage, he smoked a pipe. And like my father, he had previously smoked Camels and converted to a Dr. Grabow. His favorite model was a Prince, and his tobacco of choice, the fruity-scented Flying Dutchman. When I asked Steve what caused him to switch from cigarettes to a pipe, he explained that a pipe seemed more traditional—more a gentleman’s way of using tobacco. He said that the aroma of the smoke and feel of the bowl in his hand were comforting. He eventually gave up pipe smoking. But he still speaks of it wistfully, recalling crisp fall mornings on the trout stream, his pipe smoke mixing with the mist that rose from the water. Though he relinquished his pipe to protect his health, he obviously enjoyed it.
I’ve never been a smoker, and I don’t advocate the habit. But I admit that some of my happiest memories are associated with someone smoking a pipe: my father entrusting me to clean his pipe and allowing me a momentary puff; my uncle Paul, comfortably stretched out in his chair on my grandmother’s front porch, pipe in hand; and my husband, Steve, beginning his life with me, our early days fragrant with the aroma of Flying Dutchman tobacco.