By Marilyn Jozwik
One of the most vivid memories I have of my mom is of her in a full ruffled apron sitting by the kitchen table, a cigarette in her hand.
She looked relaxed and even classy with the cigarette between her fingers, the smoke swirling in a gentle haze around her neatly coiffed hair. Her cigarette breaks would usually follow a couple hours of ironing, or washing floors, or gardening, or some other tasks needed to maintain a household of seven. It was a reward, often accompanied by a piece, or two, of fairy food, her favorite confection. Perhaps she thought about how good a few pulls on a Salem (“Take a puff – it’s Springtime!”) or Kent (“With the micronite filter”) would taste while she sprinkled dad’s work clothes with water and listened to the steam hiss from the iron, or scrubbed our splatter-pattern kitchen floor (you could never tell it was dirty) on her knees, or went out to the garden to pick strawberries or raspberries or dispatch pesky weeds.
As one family story goes, a doctor recommended she take up smoking to calm her nerves. Women at that time were supposed to always be calm and even-tempered. There was no putting the kids in a stroller and taking a jog around the block, going to yoga class when dad got home or taking out frustrations at a kick-boxing class. Cigarettes were a popular, quick and, even recommended way to relax and socialize.
I came across an old Life magazine from 1948 and there was an ad on the back cover of a pretty woman with a big white flower in her hair, a coy, somewhat seductive, smile on her face and a Lucky Strike cigarette in her hand. Like virtually every ad, it is art, in vivid color. The tag line at the bottom reads: “So round, so firm, so fully packed – so free and easy on the draw.”
It’s little wonder that cigarettes held such appeal in the ’50s and ’60s, and did well into my own adulthood. In college classrooms, in the early ’70s, there were little silver foil ashtrays on many desks and professors would routinely smoke while they lectured. I remember one history professor would slowly speak a couple of sentences, then draw in deeply and deliberately from his cig before making a few more pronouncements. The whole suck and speak sequence was repeated over and over. It was mind-numbing.
I tried smoking a couple of cigarettes in college. After all, my boyfriend – and future husband – smoked and he was pretty cool. They tasted awful, hurt my throat and made me cough. I could not understand how anyone could get past all that. Even being cool like Tom was not enough incentive for me.
I certainly would not have been out of place smoking in my home. Besides my mom, my dad smoked a pipe, and my two much older brothers smoked just about everything legal they could inhale. I loved the smell of my dad’s Sir Walter Raleigh or Prince Albert pipe tobacco, and my brother’s cigars.
The house always smelled like a combination of smoke, and chemicals that my dad stored in our attached garage for his job. Friends would always politely comment on the unique scent of my clothes. Since I was used to it, I never even noticed.
I’m sure the walls in our home were yellower than they should have been and maybe we had more colds than we should have. But that was the way of the world at the time. Smoking was everywhere. Ash trays were lovely table decorations in virtually every home. I remember one in our basement was from Florida – a small, leathery, orangish gator wrapped around a big shell. There also was this heavy, cast-iron stand with a bucket hooked on it for my dad’s pipe tobacco.
There was hardly any place you could not smoke — airplanes, restaurants, offices. Even doctors’ offices. I mean, even the doctors smoked. In the same magazine I mentioned earlier, there was a picture of Joe DiMaggio smoking a cigarette in the Yankees dugout.
As we got older, we would chide our parents on their habits. My mom always replied, “Oh, I don’t inhale,” which we knew was bunk. She died in 1976 at age 69 of lung cancer, when I was 25.
Dad continued to smoke pipes until he suffered strokes shortly after mom died. He was 73 when he died.
I always marveled at the will of our nation’s Congress and state legislatures in the 1990s to snuff out the burgeoning tobacco industry and its fraudulent advertising that got a world hooked on such unhealthy habits.
I just wish it would have come sooner. Maybe I would have enjoyed more years with my parents.