In 1987, I sat in one of the last smoking sections on an airplane. It was banned soon.
Arizona. I worked in an office building which had a smoking section in the cafeteria and two smoking sections which were located in enclosed rooms.
I work in the same building, but for a different company. The cafeteria is all non smoking and the former smoking rooms are long gone. Even the outside smoking areas from 1994 are smoke free. The smoking areas are even further away from the entrances.
Neither of my parents ever smoked, and I remember a handful of times when they had to request that a guest not smoke inside the house. This was back in the early eighties, and I think it was right on the flip of rude/reasonable request.
When I started working full-time in the mid-80’s, smoking had just been banned in workplaces. However, we had a Revenue Canada auditor on our floor who smoked a pipe all day long, and no one hassled him about it.
It was a revelation for me to go to Japan in the early 90’s, and then again more regularly after 2000, and see how prevalent smoking still is. Until this year, I think the only food service place in Japan you could count on being non-smoking was a Starbucks. It was a little startling in 2001 to be sitting in a Wendy’s, and have the person at the next table suddenly light a cigarette.
Confession time: I occasionally enjoy a social cigarette when I’m drinking, and I do often partake in Japan when I’m out. I can go many months without smoking in Canada, 'cause standing outside usually utterly destroys any real enjoyment of it. When I was dating my last girlfriend, I gave it up completely, since she disapproved.
I just remembered an interesting point–smoking is prohibited on high school campuses here in Minnesota, but a high school in Minneapolis has a railroad running through it, and the tracks and a few feet to either side of them are the property of the railroad, so all the high school kids go stand on the tracks to smoke.
The SCA had an event there and we didn’t know about it, and people were hiking clear off campus to smoke, and one of the custodians pointed out the trick to us.
If you’ve ever read Marie Killilea’s book “With Love With Karen,” she talks about having to see the top OB/GYN specialist in the 1960’s. She is 43 years old, pregnant for the tenth time, has given birth to a daughter who died shortly after birth, a daughter with cerebral palsy, and a son who was in danger for two weeks after birth. She also has had five miscarriages.
The doctor offers her a cigarette and lights it for her. She is on complete bed rest for much of the pregnancy, but she still smokes.
I grew up in North Carolina. When I left in 2003, the restrictions didn’t seem awfully different than they were when I was a kid in the ‘80s. The notable differences were that smoking was banned everywhere on school grounds for everyone (teachers still smoked in the teachers’ longue until the mid-90s), and people didn’t smoke in grocery stores anymore. People still smoked inside gas stations, restaurants, bars, office buildings, etc, though. The gym I went to kept a back door propped open so people could take smoke breaks during their workouts. Even as a smoker at the time I found that hilarious, and never partook. Don’t know what’s changed, if anything, since then.
Yup! Just re-read those last month. It boggles the mind!