Anyone remember Eve cigarettes, with the psychedelic curly-ques.
What happened to More cigarettes? They were the extra long cigarettes. I last saw them around 1990.
We’ll all smoke Tarryltons 500 years in the future. If you don’t smoke Tarryltons, fuck you!
Winston tastes bad like the one I just had,
No filter, no taste, they’re an eighty-cent waste!
You can tell pretty much how old someone is by the amount they use when they recall this schoolyard ditty. We sang “eighty-cent waste”, but I once ran into a guy significantly older than me who instinctively recalled Winstons being a “20-cent waste”! Are kids up to four or five bucks yet? Or do they text each other about porn stars these days? And I guess snide comments like that are kind of an age marker too, right?
When I worked at a grocery store, there was one old guy, Mr. Jimmy, who came in for his Chesterfields. He was the only person I ever saw buy them. He was also a walking argument against smoking. Apart from the 5-yard aura of ashtray smell, he looked like he had been pickled in tobacco juice and then smoked in a tobacco barn. Imagine a cashew that has been stained brown with varnish. Now you know the appearance of his teeth and fingernails.
so you’re saying Mr. Jimmy looked pretty ill
Kids in my home town (suburban Cleveland) must not have been as price-conscious as most. I learned the same first line, but it was followed by “No filter, no flavor, just a rolled-up piece of paper.”
My dad smoked Bel-Airs for the decades, up until the doctor put a stent in his heart and ordered him to quit. He is the only person I’ve ever seen smoking Bel-Air cigarettes.
anyone?
Damn! You guys stole my thunder! I remember those Tareyton ads in magazines when I was a kid…I’m pretty sure the slogan was “We’d rather light than fight”, and a married couple would be pictured, each with a black eye…and a cigarette.
Imagine if they tried to run an ad like that today, if they could.
And my Grandma smoked Trues. They had that weird mercedes benz-symbol shaped plastic filter piece in them.
When we were teenagers, my friends and I called them “Vagina Slimes”.
Are you looking for a response?
Because you can’t always get what you want. But sometimes…
I used to smoke Chesterfields, and they even had a King-Sized non filter that was as long as a filtered, so you could get even more harmful goodness. Been 15 years now, and sometimes I still miss it.
Lucky Strike is very common over here (Netherlands) - 1 out of 2 vending machines and every tobacconist has them.
“Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.”
Another example of the Winston school of grammar.
Edit: Just saw the one you referenced, further down the page.!
I love old time radio, and two of my favorites were Jack Benny and Red Skelton. Jack was sponsored by Lucky Strike, and Red was sponsored by Raleigh cigarettes. The cigarette commercials were as catchy as they were criminally irresponsible. Som of my favorites:
Raleigh-
“I’d rather have a Raleigh! No other leading cigarette has less nicotine, less throat irritating tars, than the new, all new Raleigh 903! And now the star of the Raleigh Cigarette Program and MGM’s clown, Red Skelton!”
Lucky Strike-
“Be Happy, Go Lucky- It’s Light Up Time!”
“LSMFT- Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco!”
“(auctioneer jive by Speed Riggs or FE Boone) Sold American!”
Actually, they’ve spun off into several strengths and lengths. It’s my smoke of choice.
The ones that I haven’t seen mentioned yet are Oasis and Old Gold. When I worked at a country store in the eighties, we had two customers who came in for one carton each of Oasis. Even then, they had to be special ordered.
I used to have a boss who smoked Old Golds. IIRC, when I occasionally bummed one, they were a nice, mellow smoke.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot Half and Half. My Great-Granda used to smoke these. Sometimes, he bought them already rolled and sometimes he bought papers and loos tobacco, but they were his favorites.
A lot of the brands people have mentioned aren’t that rare. Hell, I smoked many of them in my late teens when I worked next door to a well-stocked tobacconist.
But Parliaments – specifically Lights – are actually as far as I can tell the standard smoke of choice among Chicago hipsters. Wander outside any indie-rock show at the Double Door or Empty Bottle and I’d bet that you’d be hard pressed to find any fashionably scruffy 20-something smoking anything else, excepting a handful of Camel Lights and roll-your-owns.
It’s weird hearing Chesterfields mentioned, because even when I was a kid in the 1970s, it was considered an “old man cigarette”, just like today, apparently. So, when smokers age, do they suddenly start craving Chesterfields when they hit their late 60s? The old men of the 1970s are now mostly dead, so someone must have started to smoke Chesterfields since then to maintain the market.
I remember my grandfather smoking Raleighs, and he made a point of buying them by the carton. Raleighs cost the same as other cigs, but each pack had a token in it, and each carton had an additional couple of tokens in it. Grandpa was notoriously cheap, and by saving up the tokens and getting premiums, he thought that he was gaming the system. Of course, it would have been much cheaper to quit smoking, but Grandpa was well and truly hooked by the time he was 13 or so.
When I worked in a convenience store, we had a few smokers who would come in every day, and get their own oddball brands of ciggies. Marlboro Green, for instance, or Blue Max. I don’t know why they didn’t just buy the damn carton and be done with it. We almost never sold those oddball brands to anyone else. But it was a steady source of revenue for us.
When I first started smoking as a teen, my cigarette of choice was Kent Golden Lights, which were a lighter variation of regular Kent. I don’t smoke anymore, so I don’t know if either is still around.