Related story, Hernando edition

Our pleasure,
our pain

One day in the far-reaching
life and love of tobacco

Editor's note: Tobacco curls through Florida like a plume of smoke. On a single day last week, Times photographers traveled throughout the state to find out how far. These pictures, taken last Tuesday, show some of what they saw.

By JACQUIN SANDERS

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 30, 1998

ike an oversized but clever neighborhood bully, tobacco shouldered aside our doubts and moved into our lives.

For a long time, we never knew what hit us.

At one point we were sculpting leafy tributes to tobacco -- that revered native American plant -- on columns holding up the Capitol dome in Washington.

In two of our greatest novels, Tom Sawyer told Huck Finn that corn cob pipes were a donation of the devil, though Mark Twain seemed to let his readers know this wasn't to be taken too seriously. Anyway, a century later, American boys, only half a dozen years older than Huck, were issued free cartons of cigarettes every week by the U.S. Army.

By the middle of the 20th century, smoking had achieved its greatest prestige. Adolescents considered it a rite of passage into the adult world. They believed smoking imparted poise in social occasions. At least, a cigarette gave them something to do with their hands.

Homes were permeated not only by the smell of tobacco but by its appurtenances:

The ashtray was a major home decoration, especially the large, commodious, often "artistic" one on the coffee table in front of the living room couch. Next to it was the showcase humidor filled with fresh cigarettes for guests and the silver-plated Dunhill lighter, often in the shape of a bird.

All over America, you were more likely to smell stale cigarette smoke than fresh flowers. Smoke got in your eyes -- and clothes and hair.

Unpleasant it was, but most people did not mind terribly. They put on deodorant and opened windows.

Tobacco got away with murder. Few complained, though it was no closely guarded suspicion that the weed might be the cause of many illnesses.

Perhaps people liked their habit too much to part with it. All sorts of people. Until about 25 years ago, it was no rare spectacle to see a doctor light up a cigarette.

Finally the research became impossible to ignore, and reaction set in. Nearly everyone wanted to quit or tried to, or said they did. A stubborn minority defended the weed, along with many whose livelihood depended on it. And they weren't all millionaires with tobacco stock. Some were farmers, many in Florida, and field laborers, warehouse workers and cottage industry cigarmakers.

Great changes came with the changing status of tobacco -- and the new militancy of non-smokers. The world no longer caters to tobacco and its adherents. Non-smokers no longer are expected to adjust.

Now the non-smoker rules. In airports and elsewhere, smokers are ghettoized. Their influence wanes, their space grows smaller.

The once overbearing smoker has entered his time of troubles.