Smoking was a part of life

I received the first two seasons of the television series "Mad Men" as a birthday present last August. The show is set in the 1960s and is centered on a New York advertising agency. It has taken me nearly five months to finish the first season, since watching television is a rare indulgence. But "Mad Men" is a very smart show and a set piece that seems, at least to me, to capture the look and feel of big-city life in the early 1960s.

One of the first things that caught my eye was everybody smoked cigarettes. Everywhere and all the time. People smoked at the table before they ate dinner, between courses and while clearing the table. In the 1960s the "little woman" cleared the table while the men repaired to the living room for drinks and more cigarettes. At least on "Mad Men," they do.

The men and women of "Mad Men" smoke in their offices, at meetings, on the subway and of course at the three-martini lunches that apparently were commonplace then. I have never partaken of three martinis, for lunch or at anytime. I am certain that a nap would be immediately required if I did.

A memoirist's piece in the New Yorker the other day reminded me of my own smoky milieau. He was revisiting childhood haunts hoping to catch olfactory memories and recalls the housekeeper ironing his dad's shirts with a cigarette hanging from her mouth. Thing is, those of us of a certain age — say approaching the double-nickel such as yours truly — grew up in smoke-filled rooms, though probably not to the extremes as in "Mad Men," where everything is viewed through a veil of smoked-exhaled gauze.

Both of my parents smoked until I was a teenager, when they kicked it. Growing up, we boys dodged cigarette ashes flicked out the window that flew back in through the open windows into the back seat in our Ford Falcon, which didn't have air-conditioning. That amenity wasn't required in New Hampshire in the early 1960s. My maternal grandfather smoked a pipe. Nearly all my aunts and uncles smoked. I started out smoking grapevine at age 10 or so but didn't take up nicotine until graduate school. More on that later.

I even made my mom an ashtray at camp one year, gave her a store-bought on another occasion. Apparently I lacked imagination in the gift-giving department. When I joined the workforce, at this newspaper in the late 1960s, folks smoked everywhere, and they did at subsequent places I worked. I spent a few years in college (and many more years later in life) at the Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches, working as a photographer.

I'm not sure the old downtown office could have operated without tobacco smoke. Publisher Vic Fain wandered around puffing on his cigar as our late-morning deadline beckoned, back when the Sentinel was an afternoon paper. Daddy Bear Weaver, who pasted up the pages, had his own cigar going. I think he smoked a considerably cheaper vintage than Vic's. All the fellows shooting the page negatives or burning the plates were smoking cigarettes or chewing tobacco. The advertising manager checked ad proofs while puffing on a pipe.

About then I took up the habit, I am sorry to say, as much out of defense as anything else. I smoked a pipe for years, which I'm certain made me look terribly foolish. Then it was on to a closet cigarette habit after which I went through years of stopping and starting. It is a tough addiction to break. I fully empathize with anyone who tries to do so.

Over time, smoking indoors finally became something that simply is not done, thank goodness, except in one's own home — and even then fairly rarely. I have one friend who smokes inside his house. He's elderly, set in his ways and has been given permission from his doctor. His company, intellect, conversation and sense of humor are worth having to Febreze my clothes when I leave.

I gave up smoking many years ago and only rarely miss it — but never enough to start back, even when I watch "Mad Men." I wonder sometimes how we all managed to breathe during those years of living in a cloudy haze of tobacco smoke — especially those folks who never took up the habit. But we did survive, some of us even to a ripe old age.