When Everybody Smoked — British Columbia Chronicles

How times have changed. It wasn’t all that long ago that almost everybody smoked cigarettes, cigars and/or pipes.

But the latest statistics for Canada (2020) show that just one Canadian in 10 smokes cigarettes, down from 12% the previous year. More men (12%) smoke than women (9%). These statistics include those who smoke only occasionally.

One of the most popular brands in Canada was Players Navy Cut. Despite its obvious play on the Royal Navy, my father, who served 20 years in the RCN, smoked Export A.

What a far, far cry from when I was a lad. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles smoked, their friends smoked, and when we could sneak them and were playing out of sight in the bushes that lined the nearby CNR tracks, we kids smoked.

We called them coffin nails and someone said that each cigarette took a week off our lives, and we’d laugh. From the mouths of babes...

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Just so readers know where I’m coming from with this week’s Chronicle: I’m intrigued by the cultural tsunami that I’ve witnessed in my lifetime—the colossal, almost unprecedented denunciation of cigarettes and smoking generally.

This is real social history, folks!

For simplicity’s sake I’m going to confine smoking products to cigarettes as they were by far the most popular form of smoking. So pervasive were they, in fact, that their downgrading to cultural pariah over just a few generations is little short of amazing. How often does society do such an about-turn? If only we could do this with booze and drugs...

So, for many readers, today’s post will be a trip down memory lane.

Those of you who smoked, or do smoke, will have your own memories of your introductions to the weed. Mine consisted of, as mentioned, stealing ‘fags’ from our parents or rolling our own from wild plants like ‘buckshit’ (ocean spray). I have to believe that this widespread summer shrub isn’t toxic or I might not be here today to write this.

I mean, if all our parents, etc., smoked, it had to be pleasurable, right? And it’s having been absolutely forbidden for kids just made it sweeter, right? So, like father, like son—sort of.

My own journey was slightly different. It took me a while to realize that I didn’t like cigarettes so I never ‘learned’ to inhale and, despite some slight peer pressure, I just lost interest. But I was programmed to smoke a pipe. Even as a kid I knew I wanted to be a writer. And all writers, as shown in newspaper and magazine ads, and in the movies, wore beards and smoked a pipe!

Ergo, come my early 20’s, I began to experiment. (I already had a beard.) That first pipe burned my lips and my tongue. But I persevered and, over 10 years came to love that damn pipe (I actually had several). Two smokes a day, mid-morning and mid-evening, but I didn’t inhale, just relaxed with it. And, bonus, women loved it!

If I were visiting friends, the wife would ask me if I’d brought my pipe and encourage me to light up because they loved the smell of the tobacco I used. (Usually, after years of experimenting, a Swedish blend, Borkum Riff whisky flavour). I thought it made me look mature—until I heard a folk song about a young man, “sucking on a pipe and looking like a pumpkin half-ripe”.

But, came a day, when several of my molars, the teeth with which smokers clamp the pipe in their mouths, started to crack. That’s because the smoke from a pipe is probably three times hotter than that from a cigarette). I resolved to finish that pouch of tobacco then quit but, somehow, ended up going cold turkey. (This is long before I read about cases of mouth cancer, by the way.) I did miss it for a while but not really that much or for that long. I still have the beard but I haven’t puffed on a pipe in 40-plus years.

As I said, writers were depicted in the media, wearing beards and smoking a pipe, which does prove the power of advertising. (More on that later.)

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Before proceeding I’d like to confirm my point that smoking is now considered to be an historical phenomenon.

For 15 years archivists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Industry Documents Library have curated a collection of more than 5000 video and audio files documenting the marketing, manufacturing, sales and scientific research of tobacco, chemical, drug and food products, as well as materials produced by public health advocates.

As of 2023, the collection has received more than 300,000 views.

A study of smoking is, as I see it, a study of human behaviour—which is why it intrigues me (and, hopefully, readers).

According to this ad, dentists *recommended* Viceroy cigarettes! — *https://allthatsinteresting.com/vintage-cigarette-ads*

So, too, is the study of advertising, ie., the deliberate manipulation of human desires for (usually) monetary gain.

Even after the arrival of radio and television, until such ads were banned by government legislation, tobacco and liquor advertisements were the lifeblood of many a newspaper and magazine. Smoking scenes in movies were written into the plot. Not just as subliminal advertising but, in the cases of chain smoking, nicotine addicted actors, to allow them to function on-screen. Without a cigarette in their mouths and hands they’d have needed so many smoke breaks that production costs would have soared.

When I was a kid, the radio ads that caught my attention were those that well may have been intended for an audience of all ages, not just my age group. Wrigley’s gums, for example; in particular (for me) spearmint because that was the flavour that sponsored by favourite weekly cowboy show.

Came television and live smoking commercials. Do you remember, for one, Garry Moore? The joking game show host (The Garry Moore Show, I’ve Got a Secret and To Tell the Truth) with the crew cut and bow tie? And how he and panellists would light their L&M’s on-stage—not during the commercial breaks, but in place of the usual canned commercials?

Moore and Durward Kirby would praise the sponsor’s product to the skies, all the while deeply inhaling and exhaling in a cloud of swirling smoke. Moore died, 78, after suffering from throat cancer for 17 years.

Popular television game show host Garry Moore. —*ebay.com*

Surely everyone who’s past middle-age remembers Jack Webb, television actor and producer of the pioneering and iconic (Dum-de-dum-dum) detective series, Dragnet. Many a live commercial did he make with a cigarette in hand and mouth for his advertisers.

And why not? Smoking was IN, remember.

Almost everyone did it. Advertising was everywhere—in the newspapers, in magazines, on billboards, on the sides of buses, on flashing neon signs, in elevators and in the movies. There were no smoking or non-smoking sections in restaurants, only smoking sections—and too bad if you didn’t smoke and didn’t like the fumes or the smell. The most you could hope for was to get a table upwind.

When I was in the militia and we were to watch a film or attend a training session the most welcome command was, “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”

Tobacco advertisers didn’t just target adults, they sneakily aimed at the youth audience—that word, subliminal, again. My next door neighbour and schoolmate collected the backs of Sportsman cigarettes. Each one showed a popular fishing fly. If you managed to collect the entire series you sent in for an album in which to mount them. Many a back of a Sportsman cigarette package did he and I fish from the side of the road during our weekend hikes in hopes of completing his collection.

The saving of ‘faggies’ as they were known goes back to the 1920’s and was extremely popular in Great Britain, peaking just after the Second World War before yielding to the onslaught of radio and television.

It’s easy to see why kids would want to collect ‘faggies’ then send away for an album to mount them in. —*Author’s Collection*

The sale of tobacco products and advertising have always gone hand in hand. Long before the print and electronic media there were trade cards (picture a baseball card), tin tags and posters. As advertising became ever more sophisticated, black and white print evolved to all those forms of advertising we know today as well as morphing into sports event sponsorship, direct mail and, in the digital age, online marketing.

The French were the first to encourage tobacco sales and to create brand loyalty with artistically designed trading cards featuring sporting heroes, beautiful women and “iconic individuals”. By promoting each card as one of a set, smokers were enticed to identify with specific brands.

How ironic—and prescient—that one early American tobacco merchant discontinued trade cards for his products because “he didn’t want to promote cigarettes to young consumers”.

In the 1920’s and 30’s advertisers began to shift to newspapers and magazines. It’s interesting to note that many ads of this period were slanted towards “the healthy virtues of cigarettes”—an oxymoron if ever there was one. Many ads showed a white-clad doctor happily lighting up or puffing on a cigarette as he promoted a specific brand. This is before the hazards of nicotine came to the fore, by the way.

Then came slogans, imagery, themes and “narratives to persuade consumers to buy their line of products”.

The 1940’s were the heyday of radio; then came television in the 1950’s. Advertisers took full advantage of their audience reach until 1970 when the U.S. introduced the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act which would prove to be the beginning of the end for cigarette advertising. If you see or hear a cigarette commercial today, it probably promotes anti-smoking.

Looking back, advertising has become the poster boy for smoking, it was so much a part of the marketing by tobacco companies and, ultimately, so much a part of everyday life. There simply was no escaping it. Beautiful women, of course, appealed to male smokers, the irony being that the lovely models probably lost their youthful smooth complexions long before old age, thanks to their smoking.

How could kids not want to smoke when their parents and their sports heroes did?

Actually, this sports hero is a fraud, it’s really character actor William Bendix masquerading as a New York Yankee. —*www.pinterest.com*

Even a future American president hustled cigarettes: a young actor named Ronald Reagan for Chesterfields. —*www.pinterest.com*

It can be argued that the Canadian government was the biggest cigarette promoter of them all in this country. My father told me that he could buy name brand cigarettes on board ship for 9 cents a package. The Red Cross included cigarettes in all the kits they handed out. For the government, it was a cheap drug with real medical benefits—it helped to calm a man in the trenches or otherwise in peril, or to while away idle minutes while on-duty. In short, a pacifier for adults.

them to express their new-found ‘liberty’. — *www.pinterest.com*

For rebellious teenage boys what better way to show their manhood and independence than to smoke, often emulating the Hollywood contrived bad-boy, James Dean, with a package of fags bulging from the sleeve of his t-shirt.

Without doubt, the ultimate macho and most successful advertising creation (1954-1999) was the ‘Marlboro Man’ from ‘Marlboro Country’—the tall, lean, ruggedly handsome cowboy—what greater American icon than that? There’s a real story here.

Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.” —*www.pinterest.com*

The advertising campaign devised by Leo Burnett has been described as one of the most brilliant of all time; certainly it was among, if not the, most successful, driving sales of Marlboro cigarettes from a one-percent share of the market to being the fourth bestselling brand in America in just one year!

All the more remarkable is the fact that Marlboro, one of the first brands to use filters, were originally meant to be a lady’s cigarette and were promoted as “Mild as May!” Then, when directed exclusively at male consumers, it became more popular with women than ever it did originally.

(As I noted earlier, a study of smoking is a study of human psychology.)

Another curious fact re: Marlboros is the cowboy model: The Burnett agency deliberately ignored filters as a health factor, choosing to feature male models in a variety of ‘macho’ occupations, from a naval officer to construction worker and the like, to overcome male consumers’ concern that filters threatened their masculine image.

This proved to be the winning strategy. From 1972 on, Marlboro was the most purchased cigarette in the U.S. with, as of last report and including international markets, a total sales volume of $23 billion.

It was the cowboy that struck a chord with smokers and there were several over the 45-year campaign. He supposedly epitomized resilience, self-sufficiency, independence and free enterprise—in short, the American Ideal. The irony here is that real cowboys don’t smoke—they chew—tobacco so as to keep their hands free!

Real cowboy Darrell Winfield posed for Marlboro for the longest, 20 years, and when he retired tobacco maker Philip Morris supposedly spent several 100 million dollars to find a successor.

Some photo shoots apparently required that the model, almost always a real cowboy, smoke as many as a dozen packs before the photographer was satisfied. Everyone of the six longest serving Marlboro Men died of smoking related diseases, it should be noted.

Not all countries have followed the Canadian or American leads on banning cigarette ads so the Marlboro Man has lingered on in some European and Asian countries.

In 1998 the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) came into effect with, originally, four of the largest U.S. tobacco companies settling lawsuits brought against them by 46 American states for recovery of their health care costs under Medicaid. The companies agreed to curtail or cease certain marketing practices and to make annual payments, in perpetuity, to the states as compensation for some of the medical costs of caring for persons with smoking-related illnesses.

The original participating manufacturers committed to pay a minimum of $206 billion over the first 25 years of the agreement.

Much earlier in Canada, in 1972, health warnings were posted on cigarette packages. In 2001, Canada became the first country to require tobacco companies to print pictorial warnings on the outside of cigarette packages and include inserts with health-promoting messages. More than 130 countries have followed suit, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.

For all that, according to a recent article by The Canadian Press, “Tobacco use continues to be one of Canada’s most significant public health issues and is the country’s leading preventable cause of disease and premature death.”

How ironic that the four largest tobacco products sellers in Canada, Rothmans, Benson & Hedges, Imperial Tobacco and JTI-Macdonald Corp.—have joined the government to fight the sale of contraband cigarettes without health warnings on their packages!

These warnings are about to enter a new, more graphic phase aimed directly aimed at children by linking nicotine to damaged organs, impotence and leukemia. In other words, “Poison in every puff.”

There you have it, a capsulized history of cigarette smoking and marketing in our lifetimes. It has to stand as one of the greatest examples of human behavioural change in human record.

Yes, the good old days. Aren’t we glad they’re not making them any more.

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RECOMMENDED READING: The Evolution of Cigarette Advertising