Tobacco
© By Abraham Lincoln

When I was a little boy, I used to go to George Myers’ Gordon Coal Office and listen to the men tell stories. My mother didn’t want me to even go there but I did.

Old wooden chairs were lined up against the wall and a tobacco spittoon was located between the chairs. Some spittoons were once brass, that still shined, but now most were a brownish black where the tobacco juices and spittle had dried. I was careful not to bump those spittoons because they were almost always full and I didn't want to clean the stuff up if it slopped over the edge onto the oiled floor.

Almost everyone chewed tobacco in those days — my dad chewed and spit Mail Pouch tobacco juice. Some people bought Kool cigarettes but you had to ask the pharmacist for them as they were kept behind the counter — the menthol in them was thought to be good for your health.

Most people were still reeling from The Great Depression and had learned to smoke cigarettes and save money by rolling their own using Bull Durham cigarette tobacco and papers.

Esta Flory, my neighbor lady, rolled cigarettes from Bull Durham, for her husband, Ira, a retired tinsmith — he made and installed tin roofs. One day he fell from a roof and never worked after that — he was the first man I ever saw who smoked cigarettes.

He smoked Bull Durham tobacco that came in a little bag with a drawstring. His wife, Esta, used a mechanical gadget to roll his cigarettes. It was her job, before she fixed his breakfast, to pour tobacco from a sack of Bull Durham (about the size of a package of cigarettes) onto a Bull Durham tobacco paper. All she had to do was push a handle over and this metal machine rolled one cigarette that looked like a brand name cigarette.

The end of Ira's nose and fingers were stained a yellowish-brown color from nicotine in the smoke. Mom said the long hairs growing on top of his nose came from him smoking so much. They were long hairs and when I was little, I couldn't keep from looking at them.

More people chewed tobacco than smoked cigarettes. My dad chewed but never owned a regular spittoon. He used old coffee cans or one of mother's glass Mason canning jars to spit in. So mom would get him a new tin can because she didn’t want him spitting tobacco juice in her canning jars.

When I was discharged from the US Army, in 1957, and went to work at NCR in Dayton, Ohio, the company provided brass spittoons for employees who chewed tobacco. NCR had crews who pushed carts filled with clean spittoons around to each office. They picked up spittoons that were filled with slop and left a clean one that shined like gold.

A lot of people were still chewing tobacco in Engineering where I worked. But that habit was being replaced by people smoking cigarettes and the spittoons slowly disappeared. One day the man who came around collecting spittoons stopped coming around. He either retired or the company outlawed chewing tobacco — then each office was filled with a cloud of cigarette smoke.