I’m not a smoker, except for the occasional cigar. Still, I was a child of the 1970s, who grew up in a family that was culturally rooted in the 1940s and 1950s, so I was one of those kids who had parents, relatives, and every other adult puffing away like chimneys around him. My house was filled with massive dinner-plate ashtrays, as were the homes of my friends and relatives.
A whle back, I saw some commercials on youtube for a brand of cigarettes called “Spud”. Really. I thought that was such a stupid name for a cigarette, but apparently up until the 1960s it was one of the nation’s most popular cigarette brands. Today, it’s extinct.
What other brands were common until relatively recently, but which are now impossible to find or now extinct? Consider “until relatively recently” to mean the 1950s at the earliest; I don’t think many still alive will remember “Colonel Thom. P. Hunter’s Remember The Maine! Little Cigar-Ettes” or something like that to be recent.
Lucky strike and Pall Mall’s are the two that come to mind. They’re the cigs my grandparents smoked when I was little. You can still buy Pall Mall’s, but they’re not very popular.
Oh, Benson & Hedges are another I just remembered as typing this.
A couple of years ago I was listening to a replay of an old radio episode of *Dragnet *from the 50’s or early 60’s, and the main sponsor was Fatima cigarettes. I’ve never heard of them anywhere else.
The green house is immediately to the right of the ivory house.
The Old Gold smoker owns snails.
Kools are smoked in the yellow house.
Milk is drunk in the middle house.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The man who smokes Chesterfields lives in the house next to the man with the fox.
Kools are smoked in the house next to the house where the horse is kept.
The Lucky Strike smoker drinks orange juice.
The Japanese smokes Parliaments.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
Now, who drinks water? Who owns the zebra?
Old Gold, Parliaments, Chesterfields, Kools, Lucky Strike. I’ll have to see how many of those are at the mini-mart next time I go.
I’ve just re-read Bored Of The Rings for the first time in many years. The mounted soldiers (on sheep, not horses) were called the Roi-Tan – after the cigars.
Tareytons. They used to have ads with pictures of Tareyton smokers all beaten up, reading “I’d rather fight than switch!” I guess they finally got quashed.
The Players my folks favoured were in a white packet with a somewhat naval theme with an anchor and ropes/lanyard and possibly a sailor figure. They were what was then called “untipped” which meant they had no filter (I think).
This was a very long time ago, my folks expired when I was young and my memories are a bit dim.
I went to the mini-mart for a cuppa joe and a breakfast burrito, and I noticed they carried Pall Mall, L & M, and Parliament in addition to the more popular brands.
