14 Year Old Governor

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yogi
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

Post by yogi »

Coke has ~2mg/oz of caffeine while coffee weighs in with ~12mg/oz. I had to look that up. The real numbers depend on the type of cola and the quality of the coffee. The numbers suggest you need to drink about 6x the Coke to get the equivalent amount of caffeine of coffee. I do know Coke as a lot more sugar than coffee and I have seen what sugar does to kids. It may work differently in adults, but coffee with sugar almost seems lethal. LOL

I must say that I've heard people say the "need" their morning coffee to get started, but my personal needs haven't gone that far yet. Just about all my 36 years of working was in an office of one kind or another and I can honestly say I never observed the caffeine effect. I've heard rumors, but never witnessed what you are describing.
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Kellemora
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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I agree with Sugar and Kids do not mix well!

When I worked in a large office building downtown STL, nearly every desk had a large mug of hot coffee sitting on it, and there was a steady stream out the door to the coffee room all morning.
Those of us who did not drink coffee could only go to the soda machines to buy a soda during our break.
Needless to say, the bottom drawer of my desk always had a six-pack cooler of bottled soda.
The cooler was designed for 12oz bottles, but I had a source for 10oz bottles of Pepsi.
Although they were the same height, the 10oz was smaller in diameter.
So I could set the cooler in my chest freezer at home using the lid to hold it open and as a stand to hold the cooler at an angle. I could add water to the cooler and let it freeze overnight. I had to put the bottles in the cooler upside down, or neck down to fit all six in with the ice at an angle like that, but it worked.
I worked there five years and the cooler held up great. I figured, why pay 25cents for a 6-1/2 oz Coke, when I could bring my own 10 oz Pepsi for about 12 to 14 cents a bottle, and keep it cold all day, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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It used to irk me to no end that the people who smoked cigarettes could go for a cigarette break almost any time they cared to. This was true in the factory as well as in the office. Everyone else, including the coffee drinkers among us, was expected to wait til break or lunch to satisfy our addictions. It took many years but we finally got even with those smokers. Motorola in it's infinite wisdom decided to become a smoke-free campus. You could not even go out to your car and light up. However, us coffee addicts still got our fixes. :mrgreen:
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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My brother fought heavily against the new no smoking laws in his business.
Ironic since he was a non-smoker himself. The thing was 2/3 of his employees were smokers.
He put all the non-smokers in the packaging area connected to the main office building, and all the smokers in the large packaging area where the shipping docks were also.
He also made the top floor of the office building a smoking floor, despite all the laws against either.
He got by with it for numerous years, because he claimed it was private property and not open to the public.
Although he did have one part that was open to the public, but that was separate from the office, warehouses, or packing and shipping areas.
After he downsized and moved his operation, he now leases and the lease says no smoking in any of the buildings.
However, there is a gazebo outside closed on two sides, with an overhead heating unit, where everyone congregates for a smoke.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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As you could imagine there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when the smokers were given warning of the rule changes. Motorola might have got away with making the same claims as your brother, but the company was all into a safe and healthy workplace. These are the guys who tried to force everyone to take a random drug test as well, which by the way, they would pay for your rehabilitation should you not have passed. Anyway, they had a room made of cinder blocks and could easily accommodate about twenty people standing up. Originally that was the smokers' room. There were no windows and only one door, and the smoke leaked out into the hallway. They hired a HVAC company to vent the room and that seemed to work out for a little while. I don't recall the reason, but it was decided that smokers should not be privileged and smoking in the building was banned altogether. At that point the smokers would leave the building and smoke outside. That was banned. Then they sat in their cars to smoke. That made them change the entire campus to smoke free status. I have to admit that Motorola went out of it's way to give the smokers time to change their ways, but that never happened. It was tense for several months, but then oddly enough the smokers learned that they would not die if they had to wait until they left the campus at the end of the day to contaminate their lungs. I doubt than any actually gave up the habit. A few did quit their jobs.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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I would have been one of them who quit.
I have my own detached office and smoke like a stoker furnace and nobody can say or do anything about it.
Unfortunately, I built the office nearly air-tight and until I could install a ventilation system, the darn smoke from the cigarettes turned the room and everything in it brown. Ruined a lot of things too.
Now, not only is the room vented to outside, but the actual ashtray itself is vented to outside separately.
Everything in here stays clean now, and second-hand smoke is almost non-existent.
Had to learn the hard way, hi hi. Never build airtight rooms!
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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You may recall Rusty, the co-administrator of this website. She never posted much on the boards, but we communicated daily. She smoked like you do, and died from lung cancer. Yes indeed cigarette smoke will turn everything it touches brown, including the lining of your lungs. I apologize for lecturing. I did it with Rusty several times. It didn't change her mind either. ...
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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Actually, it doesn't turn your lungs brown, or black, or anything as far as that goes.
I've talked to more than one surgeon who said they cannot tell the lungs of a heavy smoker from someone who never smoked. One doc told me that cigarettes do not put out any carbon, either by smoking or as second hand smoke. Now this doc I don't agree with entirely about that, since burning paper puts out carbon, and I thought anything that burned does.

I had a fiance who never smoked, no one ever smoked in her house, and she was a stay at home mom.
She died of black lung disease!
She did however always have several candles burning in her house, sometimes as many as 30 or more during holidays.
Candles put out one heck of a lot of greasy soot! Also, most candles are made with styrene, not wax per se.

I do have COPD and Emphysema, which I'm sure smoking has contributed some degradation to.
However, I'm not low on O2 at all, usually up around 97 to 99% O2 - but I do retain CO2 which is what makes it hard for me to breath, and added oxygen won't help with that.
Neither did cutting out carbonated beverages for a year make any difference in my CO2 retention.

I tried to quit smoking, and the doc gave me some pills. I just had my blood work done and everything was within the normal range. 30 days later he redid my bloodwork to find out what was going on. I was now a full blown diabetic!
How can that happen in only 30 days? It was the pills the doc gave me. Chantix, who has turned many normal people into diabetics. Now we have to suffer the consequences of trying to quit smoking. I never plan on trying again!
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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There are as many stories about smoking, both good and bad stories, as there are people. I did it too for many years, but not cigarettes. I was a cigar and pipe tobacco smoker. Fortunately I was able to contain it to one smoke after dinner every day. Rarely did I indulge more often. I discovered a pipe tobacco imported from Holland. It was powerful stuff and frequently gave me a little buzz. Supposedly it was legal, but I don't know what really was in that stuff. After about a year it infected my lungs. Pleurisy is not a fun ailment. It scared the Hell outta me because I was coughing up blood too. Terrible as it was, it was easy enough to treat. I stopped smoking 'cold turkey' during the treatment and never went back. I tossed the last of my Meershaum pipe collection before we moved here.

I have no reliable sources about what tobacco smoke does to your lungs, but I do know I had to clean the brown crud off my computer equipment frequently. It's true us cigar and pipe smokers don't do the traditional inhaling of the smoke, but the room I sat in was very cloudy. LOL I know I inhaled at least the stuff floating in the air around me and I have little doubt some of it stuck and/or was absorbed by my lungs. I believe to this day it was the pipe smoke that caused the lung infection.

My will power must be stronger than most people because i was able to drop the bad habit literally over night. I lost weight by sticking to a diabetic diet as well - 50 pounds over two years. The way the doctor determined (or thought he did) I was diabetic is by three consecutive A1C tests being abnormal. That test takes an average of blood sugar over a three month period so that three positive tests in a row show something. Well, he sent me to a dietitian and I did that routine for a few years. At the end of the dieting I was 50 pounds lighter and declared NOT diabetic. Apparently my diet was too heavy in sugar and gave some false indications in the A1C test. However, just so he wouldn't look bad, the doctor did declare I am glucose intolerant. Maybe. I don't do blood sugar tests anymore but I was well inside the safe zone when I was dieting and testing 3x a week. I haven't changed the diet very much since then so that I think I'm doing fine as far as blood sugar goes. My doctors here in Missouri can't find anything wrong, so I am doing something right.

My personal experiences with smoking convinced me that it's detrimental to the health of one's body. I don't know how many times I've told this story to friends who I hoped to influence. Frankly, I don't know anyone who quit or even cut down because of what I told them or showing them evidence that the lungs return back to normal after ten smoke free years. Rusty, bless her departed soul, argued that she had a right to choose how she was going to die if it involved smoking. I agreed, but am still sad that I could not influence her more than I did.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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I smoked a pipe for several years, had a nice collection too, some of which brought good money at an auction, which is unusual. Where I worked I smoked corncob pipes during the day, had a rack of five of them, one for each day of the week so they could dry out before I used them again the next time.

Although I've seen a couple of minor positive attributes of smoking, for the most part though it surely is not good for us, and can cause health problems. Of this I've never denied that fact.
But as far as all the hype out there, I spent years trying to find out who was behind the tests and what they tested.
What I learned is not the government, not the national or international health associations, and not the lung associated groups. None of them have ever done a test on tobacco.
What they have tested is previously contaminated samples of cigarettes to swing the results the way they wanted them to swing.
The FDA has approved almost 600 chemicals as safe for use in cigarette manufacturing.
We know for a fact 63 of those are known carcinogens, and another 43 are suspected carcinogens.

Now, if you took a glass of water, pure lab grade water, and added a selection of chemicals already approved as safe by the FDA to that glass of water and tested it. Guess What? The test would show those added chemicals, and since they already know which ones are carcinogenic, they will not claim the water they tested is carcinogenic.
This is why none of the tests on cigarettes are accurate, not even close, and never performed to lab quality testing.

I quit smoking anything at all, no cigarettes, no pipes, no cigars, no whacky tobaccy, for over 18 months.
They said, after a week the urge to smoke would go away. They said after a month I wouldn't even like the smell of tobacco smoke, and after a year, I would be like a new person.
Every single day of that 18 month period was exactly like Day One. And that painful urge to smoke never went away.
I never felt better as they claimed, and as each week passed, I became more intolerable to be around.
This all ended in a major cussing match where I worked, I used words I didn't even know I knew, and cussed out everyone on the building. They all thought I went off the deep end for sure, or were off my meds, which I was never on in the first place, hi hi.
That episode is what it took for me to go back to smoking. Within a week I was back to my normal happy go lucky carefree self. So I must be one of those rare cases where the addiction to nicotine is a permanent part of me.
I have also always enjoyed smoking. Although lately I know I smoke way too much, so do try to cut back when I can.
I'm literally a nervous wreck, much like a coffee drinker, if I don't have my smokes.

My doc always said I would outlive my lungs if I kept smoking.
He no longer says that. The fact I survived the first heart attack, due to the type it was, was a miracle.
Then because one of the pills I was on didn't work, I ended up with a second heart attack that could be fixed with a couple of stents. If I was not already at the hospital when I had my first heart attack, I would not be here today. The surgeon even said it was touch and go there, and I was in that last seven minute window before they would have stopped trying to fix the split artery and pronounced me dead. Then I had the two year long recovery of not being able to even raise my hands above my head or it would kill me instantly. Heck, if I got a hard jolt somehow, like somebody pushed me hard, or I sat down too hard, during that first year, it cold have done me in too.

My wife's niece's husband died last year from the exact same thing I had happen during my first heart attack.
They lived too far away from the hospital to get him there in time. Even then, it is doubtful he would have bled out internally before they got half way to the hospital. So I do consider myself super lucky to still be here.
I have a bank of exercises I have to do every other day, most of which are to get my heart rate up to help build up my heart muscle. Not much of it left to build up, but if I don't do my exercises, it will be curtains for me. So I do them without fail.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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There is no doubt in my mind that laboratory tests can be rigged deliberately or out of ignorance. There have been a lot of conspiracy theories floating around about the tobacco industry, and no doubt there is an element of truth in all of them. However, I think we can both agree that smoking is not a good thing. But at our age it's time to be realistic. Going forward the name of the game is quality of life. If it takes an unhealthy caffeine plus nicotine addiction to improve the quality of our lives, who is to say that is wrong or immoral?

I'm also leaning in the direction of believing addictions are inherent and not created. Your body either needs the nicotine or not. I also recognize there is such a thing as psychological addictions as opposed to physical addictions. Those with a psychological foundation can be unlearned. The physical addictions are forever. We are born with them. Of course, you might never know you are predisposed to an addiction until you have a psychological reason to sample the chemical. It's complicated. :lol:
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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Believe me Yogi, I know exactly what you mean.

I was raised around heavy drinkers of alcohol, and I'm sure a few of them were alcoholics too.
This may be one of the reasons I don't drink?
Another is I never liked the taste of alcoholic beverages.

This doesn't mean I never drank. Heck, I probably drank like a fish (when I could get it) up until I turned 21 and it was legal. I wasn't accepted into a Fraternity because I didn't drink beer. No biggie!
Never did like beer either!

I may have psychologically turned my body away from alcohol, and can assume it is an acquired taste.
Much like coffee I suppose.

But once you do get hooked on something, like soda and cigarettes, it seems there is no getting off of it for some of us.
That being said, most of the soda I do drink does not contain caffeine. I have a couple of caffeinated in the morning, then only the Zero anything the rest of the day, until after dinner, then one more with caffeine, and Zero after that.
When they quit making Diet RC I drank nothing but Diet Rite Zero for a couple of months and had no caffeine withdrawal that I perceived anyhow. I just happen to like my soda pop, to the tune of at least 8 to 10 cans per day.

I don't know if I ever mentioned, the cigarettes I do smoke I make myself from Organic tobacco. I used to buy it from a local grower, but they are not allowed to sell direct to the public anymore. In fact, I don't think they can sell in the same state. All of his leaves are sent over to North Carolina. I found a distributor in South Carolina who ships me 1 pound bags. He's never changed his price, but the taxes keep skyrocketing on tobacco products.
When I first started making my own, the filter tubes were like 1.50 a box of 200 and the Organic Tobacco was 8.75, two dollars higher than normal trade blends. I bought the tubes by the case, so they lasted a long time, the last time I bought a case, which does get me the cheaper price, it came out to something like 4.25 a box. The Tobacco is now 29.91 a bag, which is mostly taxes.
Cigarettes are the most heavily taxed commodity in the US!
While Coffee, which is also addictive, is one of the lowest taxed US commodities.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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Oddly enough Rusty rolled her own too. I don't know if they grow tobacco in England but she would buy from a neighbor who had a friend who ... well, you know. It seemed like a lot of trouble to me because the taxes on tobacco in England are negligible compared to what goes on over here. My guess is that she was simply trying to beat the system. It's a shame she never posted on this board because Rusty had some interesting stories to tell.

The tobacco tax here is commonly referred to as a 'sin tax' as you must know. That suggests it's something we can do without if we made an effort. Coffee, on the other hand, is not a sin to drink. It's a funny situation because I believe most of the tobacco sold here was grown in this country while most of the coffee comes from outside our borders. It might have something to do with climate, but the rationale behind the taxing escapes me.

Dad had 11 siblings and mom had 8. They all had Polish roots and could drink anyone under the table. Dad's side seem to be more extreme in that a few of the brothers died from alcohol related illnesses. There definitely was more than one alcoholic in that family. Dad was a beer lover. However, he did not like cold beer. He had a ceramic coated tin cup into which he would pour the beer and then heat it on the gas range. Beer is terrible tasting stuff to begin with, but heating it up is obscene. LOL The only way I drank beer was with Shakey's Pizza. And, that was Coors beer which many serious drinkers considered kids' stuff. Like most teens I drank when I could and continued until I was married. Somewhere about my mid 20's two of my buddies and I started out one Sunday afternoon hitting all the local bars we could find. I was into aged scotch whiskey at the time. I got home about 11PM after 8 hours of drinking hard liquor. I could not drink one more sip if my life depended on it. Shortly after I walked in the door I got sick and headed to the bathroom. I stopped drinking any alcohol going forward from there. Well, not entirely, but only would take a glass of wine from time to time if it was a wedding celebration or some such thing. My family history was on my mind then and still is today. If there is an alcohol addiction in my genes, I did not want to wake it up. So, now any booze I take in is part of a flambé or some such thing.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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Shortly after I moved down here I obtained about two dozen already cured tobacco leaves of four different varieties that were for a pleasant American Blend of tobacco.
Making cigarette tobacco is tedious to do by hand. It has to be blocked and cut, not easy without the right equipment.
Even so, I tried raising some of my own, but it didn't pan out to well. Hung what leaves I did get over a rope between two trees which I also covered with a tarp held open with a couple of boards. I didn't select the right plants and the blend they produced was harsh. Not wanting it to go to waste after all that work, I bought several bags of ready to use organic tobacco and added a couple of ounces of mine to each one.

Back when I smoked a pipe, I used to mix four cans of SAIL Regular with one can of Captain Black, loved that flavor.
So I bought a small pouch of Captain Black and added a pinch to my cigarette tobacco for a few months. Then the novelty of doing it wore off.

As far as I know, you can't go buy tobacco leaves anymore. Leastwise not around here anyhow. Those who used to sell leaves or blends say they can no longer do so.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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I can't find the reference now, but quite a while ago I read an article about how powerful the tobacco industry has become. The article stated that the reason marijuana was banned is due to the tobacco moguls lobbying against it. Thus the marijuana industry never developed and tobacco filled the vacuum. The times they are a changing and tobacco companies now do more than sell carcinogenics. Thus they are losing favor with the government and marijuana is starting to blossom again. It remains to be seen where all that is going, but I would not doubt that the tobacco people are the ones behind the laws prohibiting direct sales of tobacco. It would hurt their business, of course.

Two uncles from my mom's side were pipe smokers - all the other aunts and uncles were into cigarettes. Both those uncles smoked Half and Half. So, naturally, that was what I tried first. My curiosity led me to sample everything I could get my hands on over the counter, even Sail. But, after many years of that I discovered that there were custom tobacco shops with private blends of pipe tobacco. I never went back to over the counter after that, but it seems that most of those private blends were the same tobacco base with different flavorings tossed in.

Pipe smoking was not popular when I did it and I don't think I've seen anyone smoking a pipe anywhere for many years now. It may be extinct. My final excursion into tobacco experiments was at one of those few remaining shops that happened to have some imported brands. There was one imported from Holland that was golden colored and came in a rectangular tin can. It was blocked and cut but remained in it's block form. I had to separate it myself. It was the sweetest and most extravagant tobacco I ever smoked. That's the stuff that nearly killed me too.

I can appreciate the difficulty in curing tobacco. I've tried to dry my own herbs for future use, but never was able to reproduce the store bought stuff. I stopped trying and don't grow my own herbs anymore either.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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I think the way the taxes on tobacco work now is why they cannot sell outside of to license distribution.

I had a cousin who worked for Grand Candy and Tobacco Company. His only job was placing the tax decals on the cartons of cigarettes, and keeping records of same, for every carton they sent out to retailers in-state and out-of-state. Every one of those stickers had a serial number on them too which had to be recorded.

Don't know if you remember when packs of cigarettes had the federal tax band on the top, where now there is just a plain band to take it's place. When I was in the service, none of the cigarettes we bought from the post exchange had this tax stamp across the top, but did have a plain band, often with a service medallion printed on it.

My dad was in the Navy, and the only cigarettes he could get during the war was Marvel brand, which had a Navy Anchor on the band. He kept several of these packs in the closet, but some type of bug inside the pack ate up everything in it. The packs were empty when he got them out of the shoebox he had them stored in.

Sail Regular is what our local tobacco shop used as the base for 90% of their in-house blends. They bought so much of it, they could sell it much cheaper than the other off the shelf brands, except instead of a can, you got it in bags from their bulk bins.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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The structure of the tax laws would indeed explain why you can't buy direct. My image of those cigarette smoking GI's has them holding onto a pack of Camels or Lucky Strikes. LOL I do recall the tax stamp. The reason for that has to do with some trivia I picked up along the line. Some television show offered one of it's contestants a prize if they could walk down the street, open a new pack of cigarettes, smoke one, and not break any laws in the process. That seemed easy enough but it turns out that the tax stamp was damaged in the process of opening the pack. I guess that was SOP for anyone who smoked. Well, the law (not sure which one) states the stamp must remain in tact. From what I recall they didn't haul this guy off to prison, and they did give him a consolation prize. :mrgreen:

Captain Black is apparently the most popular pipe tobacco these days, and Sail comes in at least half a dozen different varieties. I smoked a brand called Flying Dutchman for quite a while, even after I found out tobacco shops had better blends. It was imported from Holland and pricey, but well worth the premium. I see that a clone of that brand is being sold now and days. It makes me wonder what happened to the original.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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One of my grandpa's smoked all the normal brands for his era, like Velvet, Prince Albert (the butt end of several jokes), and Half and Half (which he claimed was half sawdust and half road apples, if you know what road apples are, hi hi)

At one time, I had glass jars filled with nearly every brand on the market.
This came about because of the all the sample packs one of our local tobacco shops sold for like a dime to a quarter each.
Wish I had a picture of this collection. All the jars were in like an over-sized wall hung spice rack, with the labels on each jar taken from the actual packages. It was a pain keeping the humidity in each just right, so eventually I let them all dry out, and they actually lasted longer in a dry state. Could always add a humidor button to get the humidity back up on the ones I wanted to smoke.

Although we have several cigarette stores here, none of them are into cigars or pipe tobacco, except for the most popular blends. Several Vapor shops have opened in recent years, they sorta remind me of the Head Shops of the 60's hi hi.
The one large cigar and tobacco store in a nearby strip mall when I first moved down here closed a couple of years later. It was a shame to see it go. The owner refused to sell the normal brands of cigarettes because he wasn't a cigarette store. Although he did have the fancy cigarettes like Du Maurier and B&H Deluxe ready rubbed, etc. But even back then before the crazy tax increases, those brands cost four bucks a pack and up.
The two times I went in there, I remember seeing single cigars priced in the upper double digits. Several in the lower double digits, and naturally the bulk of his stock were normally priced.

I had an uncle who smoked a lot of cigars, and he always saved the wooden cigar boxes for me. Another cousin got most of his cardboard cigar boxes. Loved those boxes! Sometimes he had tin boxes, which went to another uncle.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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I do know about road apples. :mrgreen:

Back in the early 50's there were street vendors of all sorts combing the neighborhoods. Most were in trucks and drove up and down the back alleys yodeling or blaring a trumpet to announce their arrival. One such alley merchant came by on a horse drawn wagon. He was looking for "rags and old iron." Don't know what it was about our particular alley, but that horse of his would always leave some 'apples' behind. The old guy went out of business, not because there were no customers. The city refused to renew his vendor license for the horse drawn wagon. His story was in the local papers and all, but the city would not relent. He refused to learn how to drive and was probably the last businessman of his kind on Chicago streets.

My earliest years of smoking concentrated on cigars. Most could be had for well under a dollar and were even cheaper when bought by the box. There was a particular Carona brand that came in what looked like a cedar or redwood box. It was soft wood but fairly sturdy. I collected a dozen or so of them and still have one down in the basement holding a collection of real lead wooden pencils. My dad handed down a cigar box he acquired to keep a miscellaneous collection of nuts, bolts, and screws handy. The wood on this box was hard wood and seemed to be milled. The hinges were screwed in place and the hook and eye lock still worked the last time I looked at it. The amazing thing about this box is that it was a throw away item just to keep the cigars in at the store. Today it would fetch a high price at auction on the Antique Road Show, I'm sure.

One of my heroes from the old days was George Burns. He was a cigar smoker from way back. I read once where he had a vault in some New York cigar shop where he kept cigars for many years. The vault was in a temperature and humidity controlled room which apparently kept cigars smoking fresh for a long time. About two weeks ago wife and I went to a new pub down the road a piece. They happened to have a smoking room and a cigar vault. I was totally impressed. I haven't smoke a cigar in decades but might have been tempted if he had Cuban tobacco, which he did not. He claims that he cannot purchase it, but if I had my own I could bring it in, smoke it, and/or store it in the vault. The last Cuban cigar I had was in the late 60's or early 70's and was hand made while I waited. It cost a whole dollar which was outrageous at that time. It was without a doubt the best cigar I ever smoked. I'd take a guess and say it would cost at least $20 in today's world.
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Re: 14 Year Old Governor

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I enjoyed the few cigars I smoked, but since I inhaled both cigars and pipes, I figured it was good I cut them out when I did.
I don't know much about cigars other than the folks I knew who claimed to smoke cigars never relit them after they went out, yet the cigar would keep getting shorter and shorter anyhow. They were eating them, hi hi.

I remember one employee, and old guy named Kenneth Cross, who went through two or three cigars a day, without ever lighting a single one, hi hi.

Another place I worked for a short time, a fellow there smoked these dark black cigars that looked really rough, like a piece of gnarled tree branch. They looked like they survived a war, but sure had a pleasant aroma that did not overpower the room. Now in his little car going to lunch, that was a different story, almost couldn't breath in there, because that's when he gave that cigar all its worth during the short drive.
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