I know everyone has to be younger than I but growing up it was a pretty much natural thing to smoke. Your Mom smoked same as your Dad,Grandpa etc down to your 2nd cousins. It was advertised in magazines and billboards. When I was on the church council and had a meeting the first thing that was done was grab a stack of ashtrays and put them on the tables in the back room.
Man, isn’t that the truth. I think back to the old days when damn near everybody smoked. People say, oh I’d love to go back to whenever. Well, no, you really wouldn’t because all the stuff you forgot about or never knew about, would be back there to make you regret it.
I suppose it was the early 1970s, my mother would host a group of mostly older women to play cards. I would guess back then, 50-60% of women over 40 smoked. My mother never smoked and as a nurse she despised the habit, but back in the day courtesy and manners required things which are now unbelievable to most of us.
Mom used to not only have to allow the ladies to smoke IN OUR HOUSE. Which just in itself is unbelievable now. But it gets better. It was just expected that there be two ashtrays on every card table AND this last one is just the best. Mom used to keep a couple of packs of cigs (I believe they were some “ladies” brand, was it maybe Chesterfields?) in the freezer so they were “fresh” in case one of the ladies forgot hers or ran out. I still cannot believe this one, the very picture of my mother being forced to buy cigarettes just blows my mind.
My dad has a picture of him at college. He was a mathematics guy, so the picture is of him and some college friends in one of the lecture rooms. They would gather there to work on problems together so they could use the large calculating wheels and the big blackboards.
So in this picture, there are ashtrays actually built into each table. And you can see the cigs lying in there burning as well as students in the background actually smoking. Again, just picture it. Firing up a cig in a college lecture room!
I remember visiting dad at his office in the 1970s, and of course the “secretarial pool” back then was all women and most of them except the head secretary were unmarried because once a woman was married it was still expected that she would politely quit and go home. So “the girls” as every man in the office referred to them, would fawn over us kids whenever we visited, but almost every one of them would have a lit cig between their fingers most of the time. The secretarial room was blue with smoke at all times.
The good old days weren’t always so good.
