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Spittoons
By Abraham Lincoln
The tiny building set along the Dayton, Greenville and Union City
railroad line. It was built as a ticket and baggage office shortly
after the railroad came to town. The small office was no longer used by
the railroad and was sold to George Myers. It was his Gordon Coal
Office. My mom didn't like the place because my dad went there, and she
said it was, "A place where old men loafed and told dirty stories."
When I was a little boy, I used to go there and listen to the men tell
stories about some “loose” ladies in town—they didn't seem dirty to me.
I didn’t know what the stories meant, but I laughed like I knew.
Old wooden chairs were lined up against the office wall and beside each
was a tobacco spittoon. Some spittoons were once brass, that shined,
but now most were a brownish black where the tobacco juices and spittle
had dried. My dad chewed and spit Mail Pouch tobacco juice. 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 and very few used regular
store-bought cigarettes.
Esta Flory, my neighbor lady, rolled cigarettes for her husband, Ira, a
retired tinner—he made tin roofs and installed them. One day he fell
off of a roof and never worked a day after that. He was the first man I
ever saw who smoked cigarettes.
He smoked Bull Duram tobacco that came in a little bag with a
drawstring. His wife, Esta, used a cigarette-rolling machine to make
cigarettes for him. It was her job before she fixed his breakfast. She
put a clean piece of tobacco rolling paper on the little machine and
poured a little tobacco from the sack onto the paper, and pushed the
handle over and it rolled one cigarette that looked like one bought at
a store.
The end of Ira's nose was yellowish-brown from smoke and his fingers
were stained yellowish-brown too. 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.
Most spittoons in public places, like movie theaters, were made out of
brass and they were kept shinned-up like gold. Spittoons were
everywhere—not just where men loafed—they were in the grocery stores,
the post office, banks, and in the butcher shop.
My dad never owned a regular spittoon. He used old coffee cans until
they got to looking so bad that my mother who throw them out. Then he
would have to go to the door to spit—that didn't last long until she
got him a new coffee can like the one she threw away. He had to spit
somewhere.
He would use one of mother's glass Mason canning jars to spit in—that
made mom mad. That looked worse because you could see the tobacco spit,
and evaluate the tone of the juices in the jar. So mom would get him a
new can—anything you couldn't see through for him to use and she would
grunt and cuss, under her breath while trying to clean out the canning
jar.
When I first went to work at NCR, in Dayton, Ohio, they provided brass
spittoons for any employee who chewed tobacco. NCR had crews who pushed
carts filled with clean spittoons. They picked up spittoons that were
filled with slop and left a clean one that shined like gold.
After my parents were divorced, before I started to school in the first
grade, my mother became interested in someone; she said he was like
Jesus.
She told me that you could always tell a carpenter from anybody else
because they always had some fingers sawed off. He was missing two or
three fingers on his right hand. He didn't loaf much. So he was like
Jesus.
He was married to a fat lady who smoked Kool cigarettes and chewed
tobacco—the slobbers ran out the corner of her mouth. She wasn't like
anybody else I knew.
I told mom about her bad habits and she told me to mind my own business.
© 2006-2011 Abraham Lincoln - All rights reserved.
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