Thoughts Of A Long-Ago Smoker

When I think of social changes, one of the first things I look at is smoking policies, and really, society’s attitudes towards smoking in general. Other social changes have been more important, but few have been more extreme than the social changes and attitudes towards smoking that have taken place in a few short decades.

Many years ago I smoked. I smoked for about seven years between the ages of about 19 and 26. I liked Winston, but Marlboro was okay and in a pinch, I’d puff on an L&M or Raleigh. I remember my work days in 1975 at The Ohio State University when I was a 24 year-old smoker. I’d sit at a table and shuffle some papers with a cigarette between a couple of fingers, and an ashtray on the desktop an arm’s length away half-filled with butts. No one would dare think about asking me to put out my Winston. I paid money for it and I had the right to smoke it, even if it was a public workplace. Not far away, a coworker might have his cigarette perched on the edge of an ashtray, the cigarette’s white smoke curling upward. If a non-smoker came into the area, he or she would simply have to tolerate the hazy environment. Today, to people under the age of 25 or maybe even 30, all of this seems almost unreal.

To be fair, smoking indoors, in public places, was once so common that I think the odor and the general foulness of it went mostly unnoticed. Everything smelled like tobacco smoke, so the nose detected none of it. And I think there was something of a physical tolerance to the actual smoke back in those days, a kind of immunity.

A lot of people smoked. I do not know the percentage, but it seems like it was over 50%. Smoking was cool forty years ago. Paul Newman smoked; as did Beatle George Harrison. The Marlboro Man was the very epitome of rugged coolness forty years ago. But somewhere around the mid-80s things started to change. At first, public buildings nixed smoking except in assigned  “smoking areas”. That lasted a few years and then smokers had to go outside their buildings before lighting-up. Now there are places where smokers have to be not only outside, but a certain distance from doors and windows. There are some places where smoking is prohibited anywhere on the grounds. 

I quit smoking before any of these changes took place. I remember about 35 years ago sitting in a near-empty 6,000 seat arena, smoking a cigarette while watching a hockey game. Smoking in the arena was allowed at that time and besides, there wasn’t a soul within fifty feet. Nevertheless, one section away a man began hollering. I first heard this bellowing, and then a minute later realized that he was directing his shout specifically at me. When he knew he had my attention, he hollered at me to put out my cigarette, that it was bothering him.

I was stunned. How could the smoke from this lone Marlboro bother a man off in the distance? Well, of course it couldn’t. I looked at my burning cigarette, turned my gaze to the complaining man, and then after a few seconds of dramatic pause, gave him the finger. But the guy taught me a lesson. To this day I am lenient towards smokers and the relatively new rules that they have to follow. On the other hand, it wasn’t much after the “arena incident” that, in spirit, I gave the finger to cigarettes. I became a part of that social change that put cigarettes, once a staple in the American society, out the door… literally. Like most social change, it was not easy for some, but overall it was for the common good.