As posted on the home page earlier, a number of correspondents (this site has too many correspondents and not enough customers…no doubt that’s entirely my fault) ask about how pipes come to be priced, or more specifically, how come pipes come to be priced so high.  So far, no one has said, “Marty, how is it that a pipe to which Larry Roush or Wolfgang Becker has put in so much time, effort, years of experience and minute attention to detail can cost a lousy $800?  A plumber putting in that much time and effort would get more.”  No, never have I heard that. 

   Let’s see if we can break this down so that even I can understand it…and then maybe you will be able to understand it, too.  To this difficult end, I will employ the wit and experience of David Field, my erstwhile business partner who has many years (too many…he’s as old as me) in the business of importing and distributing pipes.  He started going over to Europe and buying from stores and bringing the pipes back to the U.S. in the early 80’s, and graduated to working directly with some of the best pipe makers in the world, including Paolo Becker, Rainer Barbi, Jorgen Larsen, the Radice family, Franco Rossi (Il Ceppo) and others.  In many cases, he very specifically influenced the prices of these pipes, both to retailers and end users, i.e., you.  

   My other consultant is Larry Wagner, a retailer of many years experience in the important market of Los Angeles, working from his store in Sherman Oaks.  

   And now that I think about it, I may see if I can get  Larry Roush, a pipe maker with many years under his belt.  To many, he’s arguably the best of all U.S. pipe makers and has been for some decades.  (Yeah, even he is getting up there.)  He’ll be able to give us some inside insights, if he’s willing.

   With them, and my brilliant editing, and less brilliant thoughts, we might be able to parse this difficult issue.  No doubt, there is nothing like a single area, but rather many factors, and some factors will weigh more heavily with one pipe maker, and less heavily with another.  1). The economy of scale.  At least in the past, this might well have been the one most important factor in pricing the pipes we are talking about, which is the high end of the market…basically pipes that cost at least $80 and up.  I think the $80 might be low, but let’s include as many people as we can…any number will be arbitrary, and I’m the arbitrator here, so we’ll start with $80.

   When most pipes were made by factories, as opposed to the one-man artesian model we see so often today, and millions of pipes were sold world-wide, almost every block that a factory bought (from Dunhill to places like Barontini or Savinelli or Peterson or all the pipeworks in Saint Claude, France) was made into a pipe that would sell…either in a fine pipe shop dedicated to knowledgeable smokers, or from a drugstore, at very low prices.  Go back enough years, but not all that many, and $1.50 could get you a Yello-Bole, or Dr. Grabow or a Mastercraft.  And I am not putting these pipes down, at all.  A crafty eye could suss out the best of these pipes and no doubt, if the wood was good, so would be the smoking properties of that individual pipe.

   The point is, however, that this vast bulk of pipes was underwriting the cost of the relatively few pieces of fine briar block that were going to be hand-finished and sold to pipe shops; the firsts, in other words.  If a factory was going to get $1 for a day’s sale of 2,000 pipes, they would be tittilated at getting $3.50 for the best pieces…better than 3 to 1 return on the cost of the block.  They didn’t need to make a living off just a few good blocks.

   For more prestigious companies, like Comoy’s, GBD, Dunhill, Charatan, Sasieni, etc. (remember, this was the era when England dominated the ‘high end’ market) the same system worked, albeit in an opposite way.  They were looking to sell and market, and feel proud about, their dominant brands.  But, when the wood didn’t work out, which was often, they could make dozens of salable seconds, like Parker, or Hardcastle, or Sasieni Mayfairs, or Gresham from Comoy’s, or Prodigy from GBD.  Again, the sales of these pipes…often with store names stamped on them, truly provided the bulk of the factory’s income, while the smaller sales of the famous brand-named pipes maintained the company’s prestige.  

   Today, that model hardly exists for the kinds of pipes we’re talking about.  Pipe smoking has shrunk to, essentially, next to nothing.  There are no bulk sales to stores to prop up companies.  They have to try to make a living off the relatively few pipes they make and sell.  This means that individual pipes, at whatever grade level, have to cost more.  It’s super simple economics.  $1,000,000 divided by 1,000,000 pipes = a dollar a pipe.  $1,000,000 divided by the new 4500 pipes they now make for the public = $222.  

   And if we want to talk about artisans who make one-pipe-at-a-time, you know that the price of each pipe has to be in the hundreds of dollars.  Lots of these relatively new artisans can’t make even one pipe a day.  What do they have to charge if they want to feed their families?

   So, while this is a rather imperfect model, or example, you certainly can get the gist.  With the few cars that Ferrari makes and sells, it has to charge more per car than does Ford.    

   Let’s call that part one.  It was hard.  Another factor is the cost of materials, a cost which only goes one way…up.  We’ll focus only on briar, although it may or may not be the main cost.  Let’s see what the pipe maker has to say about the subject.  In any case, when relatively big companies (small by the standards of any other industry, but big by pipe standards) bought briar by as many bags as they could afford, the breakdown for a single burl might be a couple of bucks.  Now, at a minimum, with most artisan pipe makers desiring to get only the best grained burls, and buying them in small amounts, a $20 burl would be a bargain.  And what choice does a briar seller have?  Instead of throwing all the blocks into bags, maybe a 100 or so burls in a bag, and pretty much selling them by weight, he has to sift through his stock and sell a few dozen at-a-time.  This is going to cost in the way of time and the pipe maker is going to have to pay for the privilege.  And, when that $35 dollar block displays some huge flaws and has to be thrown away or burned in the fireplace on a cold evening, the cost has to be passed on.  On at the most basic level, then, that next pipe that is made already costs $70 before the pipe maker even begins to pencil in the shape.  So, before anything is done, that pipe has to bring in $150 just to break even…and breaking even doesn’t pay any bills at all.
That’s part one of what looks like it will be a 6, 7, or even 8 part approach. If you have something to add, I’m eager to see it.

The last posting on this spot scared some people (and undoubtedly made others jump for joy) into thinking that I was going to abandon this site, stop typing and fold up the business. That was not the intent and is not the case. I just had nothing to say. That may still be the case, but the encouragement I received about continuing The Mill, mainly from the old proprietor of The Cigar Warehouse in Sherman Oaks, Larry Wagner, got me to thinking of what I could do to keep white space from taking over…maybe even taking over the site. As those devotees of Melville out there know, white can be an evil color, or absence of color. It’s been a while since I’ve read Moby Dick (the greatest American novel and likely the best novel published in English) but isn’t there a chapter titled “The Whiteness of the Whale”? And when Ahab referred to the white whale, he was not thinking of cutesy. So, forcing customers to enter a site with just white staring at them is not helping create an auspicious atmosphere. Something has to be done; and something will be done. Here’s my plan:
Rather than force it, so to speak, and continue with My Life in Pipes, which seemed like a decent concept once, but does not seem so now, I’ll approach that same idea from the much less linear angle of just relating the pipe stories (or any stories…remember this is my page and whatever I say goes) that come to mind. Many of the stories have been oft told, and it might bore you to hear them another time. Indeed, when asked to be a guest presenter by the Virtual Pipe Club, that’s what I did…tell stories. I think you can look it up. (Telling stories was a lot safer when in front of all those pipe guys than making pronouncements about pipes, which have a huge chance of being wrong. How can a story be wrong? It can only be good or bad. It can be, as Mark Twain would be the first to tell you, highly exaggerated, but so what? As long as no one sues for libel and you enjoy it, that’s what counts here.
If other ideas crop up, they might be posted and a pipe-related story delayed, but that doesn’t sound like a problem that should dissuade you from looking at and buying a pipe, does it?
Maybe the first story will go up today, maybe not, but I do know which one it will be…one of my favorites. Nothing like a great story to pull you in. It’s the one about Preben Holm and The Royal Bank of Copenhagen (or Royal Bank of Denmark…I always forget which). So thanks for reading and I hope you are regaled by all the pipe events that have made up the 45 years of my life in pipes.

I’m in luck. Maybe you are too, if you haven’t heard this one before. I’m in luck because I typed this out in order to regale someone with it and I was lucky enough to find it. I hope you like it. It’s as true as I can tell it.

Here is the Preben Holm story:

On a trip to Copenhagen, my first stop, as usual, was to see Bjarne Nielsen...a true friend. He stayed at our home during his trips to Northern Calif. pipe shops and we always spent good time together at the trade shows each year. I miss him very much.

Anyhow, on this trip, and Preben had already been dead a number of years, Bjarne said that The Royal Bank of Copenhagen (or Denmark...I always forget the exact name) had called him up and they wondered if he would be interested in a large number of pipes they had from Preben Holm. They had them as collateral for a loan given to Preben and, of course, Preben was now in no position to ever redeem them and pay back the loan. Bjarne wasn't interested, he had his own pipes to sell, but he knew I was coming and told them he might have an interested party. When he asked if I was interested I excitedly said I most definitely was.

You can imagine the images that were dancing through my head. Here, I was positive, was the very best of the best that Preben ever produced. Those pipes that were so good that he wouldn't even offer them for sale, keeping them for himself, and good enough to secure a loan, maybe a big loan, from the country's largest (presumably) and most prestigious bank. No Nutcracker fairytale images could match the overweening visions in my head that night, believe me. Bjarne called up to make the appointment, and the next day, after breakfast, we headed over to the bank.

A proper young man in a suit came out to greet us and take us up the back hallways into a richly wood paneled room. He told us to wait, and then he went to get a number of those banker boxes...about 4 or 5 as I recall it. He put the boxes down and bid me to take off the lid and look through the boxes at my leisure.

Each pipe was in its own box, so I undid the first Preben Holm box, prepared to have my eyes knocked out of my head with the most fantastic grain ever; and what did I see? Well, do you remember those unfinished Karl Erik freehand pipes that were often in a basket near the register of pipe shops? They sold for about $35, more or less. No grain, no stain, cheap vulcanite stems. But who knows, they might have smoked very well. They were just not worth finishing...better to cut short the expense and take whatever money they might bring in, and run. That is exactly what this pipe looked like...an unfinished, no grain, standard shape freehand. "Disappointed" can barely suggest what I felt. "Well," I thought, "maybe that's an aberration...maybe the rest will be what I hoped for." Box after box revealed the same sad rendition of a pipe.

"These aren't Preben Holm pipes," I told the waiting, expectant, young banker, "these are the pipes his apprentices were learning on; they’re rejects. They don't represent Preben Holm's production one bit. They may be stamped 'Preben Holm' but nobody who knows anything about pipes would mistake these for the Preben Holm pipes they've seen in pipe shops." I think he was dubious of that statement (he had no frame of reference by which to judge that or any other statement regarding pipes. He would have been lucky to be able to distinguish a briar pipe from a drain pipe. But I opened a few more boxes to satisfy myself that no gems were buried in the other boxes. No buried gems were to be found.

What to do? Well, they were stamped "Preben Holm," and they were drilled and made of briar, so I told the banker's apprentice that I wasn't that interested in them, but I could probably sell them based on the name, so I offered, I think, $35 apiece. Maybe it was $25. In either case, considering the cost of shipping, customs, packaging, etc., it was more than I should have. But, the young banker must have been told an amount he needed to secure based on what Preben was advanced, and he was rather aghast. Plus, as I intimated, he visibly showed that he thought I was bluffing and trying to lo-ball him. He said, 'no,' he couldn't possibly take that offer. I was actually relieved. Getting 150 or so pipes, marginal pieces at that, from Denmark to the U.S. isn’t easy or inexpensive.

We started walking out of the room, with Bjarne having said essentially nothing. He was very smart, and he was just watching. As we started going toward the door you could sense, or at least I believe I could sense, that the banker expected me to start coming clean with my offer and raising it. But no, I had, in fact, offered more than good sense would dictate. I was disappointed at what I saw, but not disappointed at not acquiring the pipes that I saw. In any event, we kept walking, said good-bye and moved on to the rest of our day's business. The banker never heard me say, “well, Ok, I’ll make it 50 apiece. Not good enough, let’s make it $65 each.” It was a nice try on his side, but no dice.

However, once outside the bank, Bjarne and I had the following conversation among ourselves. "Imagine," we said, "at the absolute glee Preben felt at walking out of that bank with thousands of dollars (who knows...$10,000? $20,000?) while at the same time solving a problem he had...how to dump these 'practice' pipes for which he could not possibly find an earthly use. What he must have done was to bring staid old bankers the invoices from his sales to companies like Lane, his press clippings, & ads showing the inflated prices his best straight grains were offered at to the public. What did the bankers know? They thought they were getting $100,000 worth of merchandise as collateral for a 10 or 20 thousand dollar loan. Can't miss. And now they will find out they've been taken, but good. For once, somebody, Preben, got the last laugh on the bankers. And then he drops dead, with no chance of them recovering a cent from him."

I soon left town, but it didn't take the bank long to realize that I wasn't bluffing and they were holding an empty bag. They called Bjarne back, asked him to come and pick up those pipes for whatever he was willing to give them for it (I never did ask him what the amount was, but I'll guess it was about $15-20 per pipe, for about 150 pipes) and he brought it along with the rest of his stock on his next trip, selling them to his retailers. And that is my Preben Holm story. All Hail Preben Holm.

It’s a rainy Dec. 12th and to paraphrase Melville, it’s rainy in my soul, too. Yesterday afternoon I got a call from Chance Whittamore, pipe restorer extraordinaire, that Paul Perri died. Paul was just shy of 101 years, but a loss like that is always deeply upsetting and thought provoking. Let’s start with something that both Chance and I believe…nobody, living or dead, had the combination of pipe knowledge, depth and breadth, that Paul did. He might not have been the greatest carver ever (and more on that later), but maybe because he didn’t care to try…he was extremely modest and self-effacing…but what he knew about pipes, pipe repairing, pipe making, pipe history, was immense. Let me give you one example. I had in his presence a no-name pipe, unsmoked. It was nice briar, but more than that, nothing could be known, or so I thought as there wasn’t a single letter or digit of nomenclature on it. Difficult for me to know about, easy for Paul.
He looked into the chamber and saw the chuck marks and proclaimed the pipe to have been made by Charatan. “How the hell do you know that,” I asked? “Easy,” says Paul, “I know what their chuck marks look like.” Yeah, easy. Factories, turning bowls, each had their own chucks to keep the bowl in place on the lathe and if you knew them intimately enough, you could discern one set of marks from another. Poll all your friends and see if any of them can tell one factory’s marks from another. OK…they can’t. But Paul could. How? I don’t know exactly but a good guess is that he learned their marks when doing repairs and being the official repairman for Dunhill USA and for other pipe brands, as well. He taught pipe repair after WWII to returning soldiers who needed a job. I have a strong sense that he also did work for Bertram’s famous pipe shop in D.C. after the war, but I can’t recall exactly what it was. Quite possibly, he made pipes for them. He had been making pipes since 1927. That’s 95 years ago.
Indeed, Paul could remember the exact date he made that first pipe. How? OK, here’s just one of a book’s worth of great Paul Perri stories: Paul was 7 years old, having been born in the back of his father’s pipe shop in NYC. Probably the Bronx if I recall the story correctly. His father was quite the authoritarian…a very strict Italian, from Calabria…a tough, tough region, geographically and attitude-wise. ( 'Ndrangheta is what the Calabrian Mafia is called, and their reputation is that they are stronger and more brutal than the Sicilian Mafia. I wouldn’t personally know.) So Paul, having purloined a nice piece of briar from his pipe-making father, and having made a pipe from it, naturally wanted to smoke it. But how? Most definitely not in the shop, in front of his father. Not if he wanted to survive the day. Well, a bright 7 year old had an idea…”Hey Pop, I’m going to take this new wireless (the term for radios then as they could pull sound out of the air) up to the roof to find out whatever I can . “ He did just that, but he also took his newly made pipe and some tobacco so that he could smoke out of sight of his father. Kids always court death in a most optimistic manner, don’t they? Didn’t we all? Anyhow, he did put the radio on and he heard that Charles Lindbergh, Lucky Lindy, had just soloed the Atlantic and landed in Paris to wild acclaim all around the world. That’s the kind of mnemonic that allows one to remember an event tied to it. And that’s how Paul Perri could know the exact day he made his first pipe. (His father eventually threw Paul out of the store/house, at the age of 12, because Paul was making pipes better and cheaper than his father and the old man did not appreciate the competition. Chance reminded me of that story, which Paul had also told me.)
Of all the Paul Perri stories, perhaps the next one is my favorite, likely because I am a retailer and it looks like a fantasy come true. Paul had a store…the mid 1950s I think, in Florida. I don’t recall the town. It was an era when smallish traveling circuses visited mid-sized cities, leaving the major metropolises to enterprises like the Ringling Bros. One day, a gentleman strolls into the store, along with what appears to be his right hand man, or even bodyguard, if you will. He looks over the display counters, full of the pipes Paul has made, and says, “please pull these three out.” Paul pulls out the three cited pipes, lays them on a cloth on top of the counter, and asks the man, “would you like to buy these?” To which the man says, “no, I don’t like those…I’ll take all the rest.” With that, the man nods to that large right hand man, who pulls out the proverbial wad that could, in actual fact, choke a horse, and pays Paul in cash, thereby greatly reducing Paul’s stock, but fulfilling every retailer’s dream fantasy. The man then explained that he owned a traveling circus and was unhappy at seeing his employees smoke cigarettes and wanted to introduce each of them to the pipe. If I, or Larry Wagner (erstwhile owner of the fine Cigar Warehouse in Sherman Oaks, CA) told that story, you might well look at us funny, but Paul Perri was constitutionally incapable of telling a fib like that. It had to be the emmes.
Something for you to look out for: Paul’s hobby was collecting precision measuring instruments. I saw a bunch of them in his home, but, of course, their application was way over my head. But I would guess that some of them came in handy when he was commissioned to make pipes for Hollywood movies. I’m not sure of the time span, but likely from the mid-to-late 1940s through the 70s or 80s he made new duplicates of old period pieces, oh say something a nobleman or pirate might be depicted as smoking in a movie. Obviously, the actor wouldn’t be asked to put a stinky old pipe in his mouth, so they would go to Paul with the original and he could duplicate it to the 1/100 of an inch, but it would be new. If you see any such instruments in an old movie, feel confident that it was made by Paul Perri.
How did I get to meet and know Paul? During the very early days of Sherlock’s Haven, my pipe and cigar shop in San Francisco, Paul and his wife Margaret walked into the store and we started talking. At that time I’m sure I didn’t know of him either. But the more I heard, the more I liked and Paul must have decided that he didn’t dislike me. He made a unique offer: he would sell me his pipes wholesale, so that I could sell them in the store, something he did for no one else. I thus became the sole outlet for Paul’s fine pipes (he had briar stored in 5 sheds, all from no date more recent than the mid 1970s) other than Paul, until he began giving pipes to Chance to sell on eBay in recent years. If you can find one there, do snag it for yourself. What I couldn’t get from Paul was a willingness to tell his stories, all of them, for publication in the pipe community. He was very private. He did not think he was important enough to talk about and definitely not so important that he should expose himself. In that sense, he was oh so wrong. And now I only have those few stories he was willing to share. I do believe I once went down on my knees in front of him, begging for the opportunity to record and hear and then tell those stories. The answer remained “no.”
Back to Paul’s hidden talent. He did tell me that since his retirement (which was about the time I met him, so I don’t know the type of pipes he was turning out before we met) he was only making pipes that pleased him to produce, and those were almost exclusively classic shapes, with a foray into a bit of a Danish Freehand style, but nothing ornate. What I own is just a precious little Pot of his. I’ve sold many Perris on my site. But know this…he made pipes for Ed Burak’s Connoisseur shop in NYC, and Ed drew up and had produced some beautiful, delicate and very refined shapes, so we know that Paul was definitely capable of work of that nature. Whether he just followed Ed’s marvelous designs or added touches of his own I do not know, but it’s hard to imagine that somebody with that much talent and experience didn’t, at the very least, contribute some personal style elements.
So, during this difficult time, we are bereft of another giant of our hobby. But I believe what I once heard…that a person who is still remembered is not ‘gone.’ They are still with us. Whenever I think of Paul, I’ll believe he is still with us. Most certainly, thinking of him will put a smile on my face and eliminate a little of the rain that his death has created in my soul.

Yes, I did promise to type chapters of my pipe life onto this space, and yes, a lot of time has passed without progress in that department, it has looked as though I’ve mostly abandoned that promise. In fact, it was a promise made solely because I could not think of anything else to post on the home page, not because my pipe stories might be of interest. I could, one supposes, put a featured pipe of the week up there, but wouldn’t that be sending a message that all the other pipes on the site weren’t featured? And how would those unfeatured pipes feel about the neglect? Not good, and they might take out the resentment on the way they smoked, bringing down this business, this website and what’s left of my reputation. Can’t let that happen.
Which brings us to the next chapter in my pipe life. The reason it has been delayed for so long is because it is a particularly boring chapter. Nothing happened. I was in college, flunking as many courses as I was passing, or so it seemed (and so it seemed to the Dean, as well. He displayed a terribly negative attitude toward my scholastic efforts).
Well some things happened. With the typically empty pockets of a student, no pipes were purchased. The thin accumulation of about 4 pipes stayed the same. But four was enough. Youth doesn’t feel the same deprivation as do we elders. Hell, I just this morning received a call from an old customer who is now in assisted living, and he wants another pipe. I asked if he wasn’t allowed to bring any of the pipes he owns to his assisted living apartment, but he said he had plenty of pipes with him. He just wants another. Maybe acquisitiveness is somehow attached to age and increases the need for comfort and stability, which doesn’t seem to attend the young quite as much.
What I do remember is that towards the end of my college years a wonderful friend, John Spadaro, may his tribe increase, dug what must have been very deep into his pockets to buy me a large, Black Castello Billiard as a graduation (although that was still in doubt at the time…let me tell you, it was a near dead heat) and good-bye present, although I didn’t know it was good-bye at the time. As novelist Mark Harris said in the title of one of his Henry Wiggins books, it looked like forever. It was 1965 and the first I had heard of the brand, which isn’t saying much because my knowledge of pipes at the time was miniscule. I didn’t even know there was anything to know.
The memory of Spadaro is still strong, as I consider him one of the wittiest people I’ve ever met and use the word ‘witty’ in its widest application. That Castello is also a memory. When I moved to San Francisco in 1969 some guy kept crossing my path who wanted that Castello. He nagged me about it incessantly until he finally pried it away from me, probably because him getting that pipe meant surcease from his pestering. I didn’t like him then and I like him less now, despite having not even a vague recollection of his name.
What must also have happened was the cementing of my predilection for Latakia as the near sole tobacco I wanted to smoke. That persists. Not all Latakia blends, to be sure. Very few fit the bill, which is why I don’t like it when people want me to try a tobacco, or worse, give me some as a gift. The tobacco I mostly settled on, after breaking in with Gallaher’s Latakia was Dunhill’s Standard Mixture Medium. That old version (up until about 1970) still rates in my top 5 favorites. I did try, of course, blends like Balkan Sobranie, Marcovitch, the Four Square blends and doubtless many others I can’t recall. The important thing is that I had become a committed pipe smoker. Never a heavy smoker…rarely, I imagine, more than two bowls a day, but someone who appreciated the pleasure of a quality tobacco in a good tasting pipe. (The few I had were Dunhills, thanks to a friend who worked the pipe counter at a NY department store. Two of the original four are in my cabinet today.)
I only smoked in my room at college, so as not to look silly walking around as an 18 year old with a pipe in my mouth. Thus, I don’t believe I knew of a single other person who smoked a pipe, other than the R.A. in my freshman year.
That’s about the end of this chapter. Don’t expect other episodes to be as short, and definitely not as linear. With your permission, I’ll go all over the place, as one story triggers memories of others. That would give a more accurate picture anyhow. “Time’s arrow” probably only applies to books on astrophysics; life is different, isn’t it?

Chapter 3

Where we left off was on 6th Ave. in NYC, after a pipe shop clerk threw me an inexpensive, probably basket, pipe and a pouch of aromatic tobacco, the detected aroma of which still turns my stomach 60 years later.  Such is the power of smells to penetrate deeply.  What remained at that point was for me to find an opportunity to smoke and test the two.  That, I would do in my dorm room upstate.

   If you are young and did not experience those days, and the reference somewhat surprises,  be aware that you could not only smoke in a dorm room, you could smoke in a hospital room.  You could smoke in elevators and buses.  You could probably smoke while operating over an open wound, with the cigarette’s ashes falling into the gap.  Who knows, might have been the best thing for the patient.  

   Remember, I was barely 18 years old and looked even younger than that, so rather than walking around campus looking preposterous and affected, I planned on sticking to my room when puffing.  It’s possible that a self image arose of me sitting at the desk, lit pipe in mouth and school books open.  As it was pipe smoking never did intrude on my study habits.  Nothing intruded on my study habits; I had no study habits.  No doubt the reason for my expulsion at the end of the semester…no calamitous event, I assure you.  The real problem was the pipe and mostly the tobacco taste.  If that acrid taste was to be the outcome of pipe smoking, it was a practice that was going to have to continue without me aboard.  I gave that pipe and tobacco combination two or three tries and no one of them was more satisfying than any of the others.  Now, I’m not a quitter, unless the going gets tough, so I thought to give this plan of mine one more chance, and why and how I came to that conclusion evades my recall these 6 decades later.  I had never smoked anything so it was not a habit or a way of emulating any cool people I envied. It was just one of those improbable decisions, seemingly out of thin air, that people make about their lives…like deciding to become a proctologist I suppose.

  “M Street,” shorthand for the school’s nearby shopping stretch, contained an all-purpose store that sold some pipes, a selection of pipe tobacco tins, blue jeans and other sundries that people not named Marty Pulvers bought.  With no bulk tobaccos in small clear plastic bags to confuse me I was going to be forced to made a choice of just one from a multiple of tins.  It was here that I displayed the keen aptitude that undoubtedly encouraged the school to accept me as one of theirs (for a limited time…they eventually woke up, didn’t they?).  It was, I understood, a do or die situation; one more tongue searing and it would be good-bye pipe smoking.  As my eyes and brain functioned in a tandem worthy of an astrophysicist searching for ETs, it was clear that all of those tins were the product of clever, artistic, deceptive and seductive practices.  All except one tin…it was Irish.  No graphic art skills employed there.  Nothing clever was going on, one could be confident of that.  Nothing deceptive or seductive either.  This outstanding looking tin (in the strict sense of that word…it stood out) was colored graveyard gray, with simple black letters: “Gallaher’s (not Gallagher’s.  Don’t make that mistake) Guaranteed Pure Latakia Tobacco.  Gallaher’s Ltd., Belfast & London.”

   Gallaher’s (may their tribe increase) Latakia presented new and strange horizons with its very name.  It evoked no thoughts or dreams or drool from my salivary glands.  But the simple message of purity, the extreme confidence exuded by the absence of pretty and alluring colors, made me think “if they don’t have to draw you in with Madison Avenue bullshit, it must be that the tobacco in the tin is what does the selling.  That’s the part that has to be good in this case.”  Summa Cum Laude quality thinking?  Worthy of a MacArthur Grant? Hard to say.  But unlike a lot of the effort that ensues from people on those stratospheric planes we can take a look at what that cogitation wrought here.

   Managing once again, with a will power reminiscent of a real Achilles, I eschewed the school work calling my name and opened up this new tin and took a look, pure black, took a smell, pure smoke, and took a puff.  Pure Eden.

For some of us, the predilection for Latakia is innate.  It’s a wonderful genetic inheritance.  Sure I might never be a student.  Sure I might get expelled at the end of the semester.  (Yeah…they tried that mean trick on me twice.  I outlasted the buggers.)  But I would be a pipe smoker.  A much better prospect with a much longer shelf life.  

A word to all those concerned about the West Coast Pipe Show scheduled for Nov. 6th & 7th at The Palace Station Hotel in Las Vegas. Concern, and the deluge of inquiries, has grown since Chicago has been cancelled. Here is the latest scoop on the Vegas show and it’s easy to follow. The show will go on if, by the very beginning of Sept., all of the restrictions on gathering together are lifted. It’s that simple. If we can get together as we have in the past, there will be a show the first weekend of Nov. Thus, don’t call or write to me or Steve O’Neill. Don’t offer to make reservations…nobody wants to do all the paperwork taking payment and then all the paperwork to return it, if necessary. Use your noodle. Pay attention to the doings in Nevada. The action the state takes will determine whether we can proceed. We need to know by Sept. 1st. in order to attend to all the details. Learning in Oct. that a show would be possible is too impossibly late.
Later news: I saw a headline today (May 4th) that says “New York Region Preparing to Lift Nearly All Limits.”
If that’s the case with New York, can Nevada be far behind? Remember, we need all restrictions to be lifted by Sept. 1st for the West Coast Show to go on. We can be cautiously optimistic. I think that’s the stance to take.

Chapter 2

There is a little time available this evening and I hoped to try to write a chapter a week each Sunday; this puts me two days behind, which is not all that terrible, is it? My excuse is [and yes, I do understand that there are no excuses in life. “You may have your reasons,” Sgt. Wardell Payne (may his tribe increase), our drill instructor in Basic Training told us, “but there is no excuse.” In other words, do what you are obligated to do and do it on time and without complaint. It’s not always easy to live up to, but it is worth a try.] that I am preparing for the short presentation that the Virtual Pipe Club has invited me to do this coming Saturday. Here we are, though, about to push on into and through Chapter 2. It’s the one where I buy my first pipe.
You all have first-pipe stories, and many of them are similar, undoubtedly. Only the name and location changes. This one takes place in Manhattan, perhaps on 6th Ave., aka Avenue of the Americas. But maybe not…this was toward the beginning of 1961, shortly after my 18th birthday (nor was age an impediment back then, if memory serves) and what prompted me to want to smoke a pipe is a mystery, unless, as I suggested, it was seeing my father smoke a pipe the one week each year he stopped working two jobs and relaxed with his family. Otherwise, I did not smoke. I had a cigar once, at my cousin Paul’s Bar Mitzvah and got very sick and when my father found out he came over to chew me out, saw I was in that green state just before a welcomed death, shook his head and walked away. He saw that the lecture he would have delivered was already self-inflicted.
Allow me to give myself some credit. Instead of walking into a drug store or other anonymous place where I could have picked up a blister pack pipe and a pouch of drug store tobacco and placed it on the counter without having to reveal complete ignorance about pipes and tobacco I walked into a pipe shop. There were plenty of them in NYC at the time, so I can’t recall which one this might have been, although I believe there was a “Rogers” in that neighborhood and this might have been that place.
A little digression here. It has long been a personal contention that one reason so many pipe smokers in the U.S. smoke inexpensive, shellacked pipes is because of what was briefly described above. It is easier for many to pick up a pipe and tobacco in a place where you don’t have to express any knowledge of the product than to go into a specialty shop, like a good pipe or tobacco shop and deal with arcane lingo and details about which you are unfamiliar and unsure. It can be threatening. Like a typical guy going into a woman’s lingerie shop. Well, maybe not exactly like that but you get the picture. Understanding that is why I always tried to remember to treat new customers to Sherlock’s Haven in as gentle a manner as possible, and made sure not to look down on their inexperience. I’d also kid with them a little to help them feel comfortable. Come to think of it, looking at that lingerie shop analogy, maybe that’s part of the reason there aren’t more women pipe smokers in the U.S. Most women are likely to feel uncomfortable walking into what is considered a male bastion. More women customers, more customers, was always a goal of mine. Consider this…a woman smoking a cigarette or a woman smoking a handsomely carved pipe…which is more attractive (if you can get past the cultural habituation)? Not close, is it? A woman smoking a pipe can be real sexy.
The shop I walked into in Manhattan, not surprisingly, was staffed by an old geezer who did not have my supportive technique under his belt. What he did was pick out a pipe…more or less a basket sandblast, and threw a pouch of some aromatic at me and took my money. He plainly didn’t want some punk kid bothering him. Nor did I know a single bit of pipe or tobacco terminology. I didn’t know enough to ask a question, an intelligent one or otherwise. It was a start, though, whether I understood that much or not. Next chapter will deal with my foray into finding a tobacco I could enjoy…perhaps the absolute key to becoming a pipe smoker. Thanks for reading.

Chapter 1

Where to begin what will undoubtedly be a long, boring self-centered autobiographical cruise through what I consider the central motif of my adult life? Surely, surely you have something better to read, or do with your time. For me, it’s self-reverential, or, to be more honest, since I do not revere myself, something with which to fill this page.
Enough of pathetic disclaimers…where to begin is the issue. How about as a young boy, the one you can actually see on the site’s home page. In my youth, on our family’s once a year, one week, vacation, they would pile my older sister and I into the backseat of our 1938 LaSalle, put a Newsy style cap on my head and a corn cob in my mouth, and off we would drive…to Quebec or the Amish country of PA or maybe to beautiful Virginia (Williamsburg, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Luray Caverns). During this relaxing period, when my father did not have to work two jobs, and my mother one, to maintain the family, my father smoked one of his three briar pipes…a Dunhill Root Bulldog with the metal tenon, a Billiard from Ehrlich’s in Boston and a Mastercraft, which I no longer have and can’t recall the shape of. Maybe that’s where I got the notion I’d like to smoke a pipe…I do not have a memory of the tobacco he smoked, either by name or aroma, and aroma memories are supposed to be very deeply embedded. The rest of the year he smoked cigars. That corn cob in my mouth must have kept me happy (my sister was certainly no help in that department, punching me as often as the mood hit) and helped create an enduring story. Many years later, when my mother came to Calif. to visit Joy and I and mostly her granddaughter, we were all about to pile into our car for a trip. Seeing her granddaughter get into the back seat, my mother related how when I was a kid, a cap on the head and a pipe in the mouth was all that was required to keep me quiet.. “Well,” Joy said, pointing to my Giants cap and Prince in my mouth, “nothing has changed except that now he’s in the front seat. “

My Life in Pipes - Introduction

This really doesn’t need an introduction, but it makes things look serious, and almost all the books I read have one. I don’t like introductions. When I pick up, say, “David Copperfield” it is for the contents alone and not insights, or commentaries on why the author wanted to write this particular book. If I wanted to know those things, I would have become an academic or critic or have an inquisitive attitude about the book in question. No, I merely want the diversion from a hard day at the computer dealing with all of you and your multitudinous idiosyncrasies. Plus, some, if not most, introductions seem to come from people like me, who, once they start typing and getting their thoughts on paper, can’t stop. An introduction of say a page and a half would be acceptable. Fifteen pages? Ridiculous. That’s not an introduction, that’s an essay. (Jazz has, in my opinion, a similar problem. Rock n Roll, Pop, The Great American Song Book, even Hip Hop & Rap know enough about the attention span of the average human to keep the song to 5 min. or less. In Jazz, you’ll find a trumpeter blowing the same 3 notes for 5 min. No wonder it’s so hard to make a living being a jazz musician. If you’re playing for yourself and making private art, fine…go on for 24 hours for all we care, but if you want paying customers, you’ve got to cater at least somewhat to their needs and desires and know when the f… to stop, and leave them wanting more. It’s not a hard concept. And if you’re an uncompromising artist and insist on doing it your way, don’t complain when others don’t agree enough to pay for the questionable privilege of encouraging your obsession. A professor teaching advanced Quantum Physics can not whine if only 5 students show up for his course. )
This introduction is to let you know two things, if I can stop myself from typing and limiting it to just two: because I can’t think of how else to fill up this space a, I’ve decided to type out, in chapters, my life in pipes. Most definitely, this is at least as much for my edification as for yours. A need to write things down is in me. Also, I tend to forget and am forgetting more and more. It might, in some very small way, add to the history of this hobby. To that end, my trusty, loyal friend Nanosh is going to set up a page on which each chapter can be placed, prior to me plunging on. The chapters will be on a page titled, oh so cleverly, My Life in Pipes. I’ll attempt a chronological onslaught to the 45 years this pipe stuff has been going on, but expect a lot of back and forths as thoughts arise.
The other aspect is the biographical tone of this; it would be nice if my daughter had a different view of her father as someone other than the ogre that wouldn’t let her go skiing with her friends because she didn’t even give us a full day’s notice and we had no idea who was chaperoning, etc. So, all this might not be limited to pipes, especially if I start towards the beginning of my consciousness, which consciousness seemed to awaken mostly in the presence of attractive women. Sue me. Indeed, as much as pipes mean to me, if I had to give up pipes or women, the pipes would have to go. (On the other hand, if a woman in my life wanted me to give up pipes, the woman would have to go. Go figure.)
One more, very, very important item before this introduction to the project is terminated: this website’s platform is not properly flexible and it is almost impossible for me to write out the chapters beforehand, re-write them, edit them and check for style, etc. That is very bothersome. I take writing as a somewhat sacred exercise, just as books are sacred in the sense that they carry ideas, good or bad. The probability that this will be far less readable than need be the case is upsetting. It is not my intent to put indifferent text in front of you. This is an apology in advance. You really should go get yourself a good book by the many fine authors out there and let me stew, right here, in my own juice.
Marty
P.S. The goal would be to post a new chapter each week…say on Mondays. That will not happen. But it is a goal and failure to achieve it might make me feel guilty enough to be a day, or a week or so late…but maybe better late than never. I also allow myself the freedom to interrupt the flow to type anything else I might want on this page. It’s my page.