First Pipes

Old Sasieni AdvertisemeYesterday, while I was visiting my Saturday-tobacconist-haunt, I encountered a number of younger men who had come into the shop to purchase their first pipe.

A couple of them had brought their wife or girlfriend along with them for the purchase. Curious, really. I can’t imagine my wife setting foot inside my tobacconist. Surely she’d flee upon encountering the first drifting blue-black nimbus wafting toward her. So, I curiously observed their self-conscious inspections, wondering why any man would want a woman along while he tried to take the measure of pipe-flesh.

It is hard for me to keep a straight face when a guy holds a pipe almost to his lips, then turns in profile to his mate, uttering “How does this one look?”

I want to declare, “A pipe is not a tie!”

I wonder if these women sense that if their man manages to complete his pipe novitiate and enters the fraternity of pipe-smoking men, she will have lost the man she thought she had snagged. He will become a different kind of male. He will likely begin to choose for himself. He’ll choose things and people who please him, too. She may lose veto power over particular colognes and after shaves.

I haven’t always known it, but choosing a pipe is a ritual. It is an intimate thing to choose a pipe. A man says a lot about himself when he chooses a pipe in someone else’s presence. He’ll signal the relationship he’ll have with the pipe. If you know how to see, you can tell whether that new pipe will be a tool, a treasure, or a talisman.

Drawing of an impeccably elegant pipe smoker.The twill-shirted, Wellington-booted man who grabs a Peterson army mount billiard after only 30 seconds in the store, then drops it into his shirt pocket after peeling bills off of a rubber-banded roll just bought a tool. A man who tentatively flits from pipe to pipe like a nectar-crazed hummingbird, finally lighting on burnished briar nestled in suede calf leather? This man has bought a treasure. Then there are those pipe men whose lighters race their credit cards. These are the men who can’t and won’t wait to claim the pipe by smoking it.

Although I’m in the middle of my 57th year, I can still remember my callow self trying to select my first pipe. I was like a new-born calf trying to take my first step. I wobbled from showcase to showcase, trying to act like I wasn’t as clueless as I was.

In those days, men smoked pipes. When a person entered a tobacco sanctum, the at-elbow salesman actually was a pipe smoker, not a cigar smoker. In those days, most pipe men were smokers, not collectors. Your average pipe man wasn’t a preener. While his pipes might have been clean and well-cared for, they also might have been smoked like Lucifer’s hams. Pipes were nicotine-delivery systems, but they were also talismans. When accompanied by a book, papers, leather, and tweed, they signaled that their smokers were not only thinkers, but thoughtful. 

The salesman who helped me wasn’t the kindly older gent who, with patience and warmth, might musingly reveal that I would be better off with a straight billiard than some bizarre Danish freehand that looked like Tim Burton might have designed it during an acid trip.

The great American character actor Wilford BrimleyNo, my first encounter with pipe-buying was with a burly, suspendered Wilford Brimley-look-alike who could have shut down most any Glengarry Glen Ross moment. He was impatient. He was abrupt. He had clear vision. He saw me for the greenhorn I was.

He refused to show me a couple of pipes that I wanted to inspect, rolling his eyes and muttering, “I don’t think so.”

I was confused. I was embarrassed. Mostly, I wondered what I would be allowed to buy.

“How much money have you got anyway?” the salesman demanded. “You’re going to have to buy more than just the pipe. You’ll need pipe cleaners and a pipe knife and tobacco and a pouch. Do you have any of that?”

I just gaped at him.

He was on to me. He know that I was there to buy more than a new pipe. I was there to buy a new Neill. I had a hunch that becoming a pipe-smoker might transform me from yearling to stallion, from a hayseed to a suave-man-of-the-world. I had re-imagined myself a pipe smoker, even though I had no idea what being a pipe man entailed. Needless to say, not even Bo Nordh was capable of making a pipe that could accomplish the transformation I hoped for. I needed an extreme makeover, not a pipe.

He grabbed my elbow and steered me toward a case that was catty-corner from the pipes I had been reviewing. We shuffled around the back of the case. He bent over, stretching his white-shirt-sleeved arm into that glass pipe-maw and snatched a pipe out.

“Now, this is a pipe,” he announced. It was a smooth, walnut-hued three-quarter bent billiard Sasieni four-dot Viscount Lascelles.

To me, the pipe looked like an old man’s pipe. It didn’t sport translucent, swirly lucite. It didn’t have nooks, crannys, peaks or valleys like the freehands I’d looked over. It was, well…plain. It wasn’t the kind of pipe anybody would notice. I wanted to be noticed. I wanted a pipe that was as carefully cast in the construction of my architected erudite character as was the rest of me. I had only one problem; I was terrified of that salesman. Worse, he knew it.

I said nothing, but just nodded my head. A surprisingly graceful old fart, he pivoted like Baryshnikov and dragged me toward the tobacco shelves whereupon he selected the tobacco I would smoke. I still don’t know what it was because it came out of a jar with some name on it like Kings Ransom or Man of War or Admiralty. These tobaccos had monikers that would make a tycoon swoon, let alone a sapling like me who couldn’t even spout proper sideburns.

I left that store with tobacco, pipe cleaners, a pouch, a pipe knife, and that Sasieni Viscount Lascelles (I love that name). I had my first pipe smoke in private in my room with an open window while reading Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure.” Can you imagine a more perfect or serendipitous book for the occasion?

Forty years later, I still have that pipe and it has all the earmarks of a pipeman’s first pipe. I chewed through the stem and blackened the rim as I spent many happy hours blissfully smoking it. 

Neill Archer Roan at his desk with Blue Riband apple.As I reflect back on one young man who bought his first pipe yesterday, I feel a bit sorry for him. The pipe with which he looked best in profile very well could have a teaspoon or more of black stain in the shank. He bought his pipe from a lovely man, a kindly, gentlemanly former Georgetown classics professor who, knowing him, probably tried to persuade him to spend a bit more and acquire something better.

When I compare our experiences, I feel luckier now than I felt then. The loyal sweetness of that Sasieni did more to help make a new Neill than I might have imagined was possible.

First pipes can do that. 

Comments

[Lawdog]

Wonderful indeed. Took me for a walk down memory lane...the first pipe...great story and the photo of you and the pipe is GREAT...

See you in Chicago.

robert

[Richard Friedman]

Neill, Thanks for the trip down your Memory Lane. As ever, your modesty, humor, and writing talent shone through.

Your tale reminded me how fortunate I was to have my Uncles Sam, Al, and Julian as guides to the world of pipe smoking.

As a lad, about one Saturday a month, my Father's three bachelor brothers, who lived in a yellowed and mellowed smoke-filled home together until their deaths, would pick me up in West Hartford and drive down to New York early in the morning. They drove a little Fiat and all three of them smoked their cigars and pipes the whole way to the city. If I ever tried to crack a window, I caught holy hell!

Arriving in the city, we would start in the lower east side and pick up loaves of hot, crusty bread in Little Italy, then walk down the street to a cheese shop–open to the street by the corrugated lift doors, with huge wheels of Swiss, pungent rounds of Gorgonzola, and myriads of others wafting their aromas for blocks. We then would move on to the Italian imported food shop for freshly imported pasta, tomato sauces, olives, and tins of bonito & tuna.

The next stop would be the Tobacconist, where they would stock up on an assortment of cigars and pipe tobacco. Then off to a deli for lunch, and then to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, or some other fun and educational venue. Finally, we would end up at Radio City Music Hall, take in the stage show and the latest movie, and then the long, smoky slog back to Hartford.

When I was sixteen (1966), making the same rounds, we came into the Barclay Rex shop on Maiden Lane, and Uncle Sam turned to me and said, "It is about time you had a pipe, young man."

After looking around the shop, we settled on a half-bent, blasted Dublin by W.O. Larsen. He then guided me to the tobacco counter and recommended one of the house blends, a semi-aromatic–ready rubbed–and threw in a few bundles of pipe cleaners, wooden matches, and a modest pipe tool.

Then we sat down, and he showed me how to properly load a bowl, light, tamp, and relight. On the trip back to Hartford, there were now four pipes lit in that little Fiat.

According to tradition, I "became a man" at my Bar Mitzvah, but in a subtle way, my first pipe marked, at the very least, a more solid confirmation of that destiny.

Thanks again Neill, for sharing your own memories and stirring up mine.

[Smoking Logician]

Many thanks, Neill, for recounting your tale of youth become man. It's enlightening, isn't it, to realize that we've become men -- mature, self-directed, and with an independence of conscience -- not so much at the instant of an event we'd at the time considered a milestone, but much later, when reflecting upon those events from a vantage point won by years of experience. Thank you for bringing that truth home to me. I'd forgotten it. And with forgetting it I'd also forgotten the enduring worth of recollection, since of late I've been swamped by the sort of deadlines that can swallow a person whole, taking with them one's feeling of having already done so many good things.

My first pipe was a Grabow bought from the local corner liquor store, a bulldog with threaded twist-o-matic stem. 'Golden Duke'. The words confirmed the rightness of my choice. But I didn't make the choice alone. That store was the sovereign territory of a middle-aged woman unafraid to chase the occasional drunk from her lands armed with a pipe. I'm no drinker and wasn't then. I'd rarely set foot in such a place and in fact knew of her pipe-wielding prowess only from fellow philosophy students who met, without me, for night-long games of poker and single malt scotch. So when I asked her, 'Which one do you think I oughta choose?', I'm sure I asked with trepidation. Her answer: 'If you're gonna smoke a pipe right, you don't need me to tell ya. Choose for yourself'. My pipe guru and yours have gruffness in common.

This enlightened gruffness, it seems to me, is little with us in today's world, with its speeding pace and McDonaldland smile. What a loss.

[Ed Anderson]

Amusing tale Neill. First off I had to laugh, I thought that photo was Robert (Lawdog) and wondered what part he would play in your story.

As for my first pipe, it was bought at the 7-11 where I worked. My boss was a life long pipe smoker and all he smoked was Sir Walter Raleigh in a Falcon. Guess what I started with! Wasn't all that bad and it got me into pipe smoking. Then one day a local policeman who was a pipe smoker stopped in for coffee. He told me about a Pipe Shop a few miles away, where the owner made his own pipes!

I made the trek on my 10 speed (I had no car) and entered a world of pipes and tobaccos that led me to where I am now. Nothing like your bully clerk but a true mentor was what I found.

As for wives and pipe shops? One time and no more! Wanting to allow my lovely spouse share in my pipe experience we went into a shop we encountered on a vacation. Not wanting to leave her out of my selection I wound up buying a pipe that "she" liked and a pipe that was in a price range "she liked". One time and no more! I don't try to tell her what and how much to spend on purses or clothes and I don't ask for her input on my pipes. It's a man's world when it comes to such a defining purchase as a new pipe!

[Lawdog]

Ed,

For a second I thought it was me as well. LOL.

Robert

[Neill Archer Roan]

Robert, it IS you!

[Lawdog]

Well, I guess I need to give you some lessons in Photoshop...LMAO

[thefoolish]

I, perhaps more than most of your readers, am very close chronologically to that time when I bought my first pipe, just barely two years ago.

I remember that experience well, those not with the same linguistic grace as you, and reading this makes me thankful for my experience.

Thank you for the great article.

[Klejdi]

I remember with nostalgy when 10 years ago bought my first pipe in Krakow. I was a pear or cherry wood one as I had o idea of the material. It took me some 30 minutes to choose it with the shopkeeper which knew not a word in english. The second one was a tiny bamboo sandblasted stanwell at which I gazed every morning while going to the university in Turin.
Thanks for the article

[Dutch]

Thanks for sharing such a fantastic and personal story Neill. It conveys the true attachment and romance of one's first pipe.