Smoking

Leta's friend Marjorie always had cigarettes available to accompany the wine brick when their card-playing club met at her house. Hazel usually enjoyed one or two over the course of the evening, but her husband didn’t approve of women smoking. A couple of other friends would also imbibe. They liked to smoke while playing cards, they said, and only then. Marjorie herself smoked regularly, mostly with her husband. She detested smoking alone, however, which is why she shared her cigarettes with her friends.

Leta refrained. Her father was a smoker and sometimes the smell of the them would remind her of those painful years after he returned when she was a teenager and how he would simply sit in the living room, drink beer, degrade her mother and smoke one cigarette after the other. Her first husband Ralph tried cigarettes, but preferred to smoke a pipe.

In 1924, when she was married to her second husband Albert, the Philip Morris company began promoting its new brand with images of women: Marlboros, the company advertised, were “Mild as May.” Bewitched by advertising that featured themselves, many women became smokers at that time. Because Albert smoked, Leta would occasionally take a cigarette, particularly if they were at their favorite blind pig for a hit of gin and to chat with friends. When they constructed their own still, their forays to the blind pig became rare, and consequently, Leta never developed the smoking habit.

She did like, she admitted, the quick light-headedness that came with the first few puffs. After Al’s death, however, she stopped smoking.

When he smoked, her third husband Ora smoked cigars, which she detested. The smoke of these monstrosities started to permeate everything in the house, which made her clean more thoroughly. She rarely noticed the smell on herself, although she must have carried it, she surmised, since she shared a bed with her husband, and he bathed only once per week. She frequently found herself asking him to please switch to cigarettes, but he wouldn’t.

The cigar smoking disagreement became most unpleasant one evening when she was ushering her 11-year-old son Dale to his bath after a day of fishing with Ora. Over the several months of her marriage to Ora, Dale began to adopt some of Ora’s bad habits, including a powerful reluctance to bathe. Leta was wrestling her son out of his clothes when she noticed that there were ashes and brown spots on his shirt. She immediately changed tone and focus, so when she asked her son to blow his breath toward her, he complied, partly out of surprise. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “Now take your bath.” She left Dale, went into the living room and furiously began to shred all of the cigars her husband had stored in a small box on an end table. While she couldn’t prevent her husband from smoking the foul things, she could and would keep them out of her house and away from her impressionable son.

Leta started smoking cigarettes as an occasional habit shortly after she married Leech Hoose in 1929. For her birthday, he gave her a lovely silver and gold cigarette case, and she was so smitten that she took up the habit to express her appreciation. Leta and Hoose would spend two or three nights each week at the blind pig with two other couples that smoked. After two cocktails, the cigarettes tasted better, and she began to smoke Chesterfields; they all did, and liberally shared with each other.

From the 1930s on, Leta continued to smoke, but adapted her tastes to her company and tried Lucky Strikes, Camels, Raleighs and many other brands. In fact, she learned very quickly that a friendly fellow would either light her cigarette for her or ask her if she wanted another one with her drink. Over time, her habit graduated to nearly a pack a day. She enjoyed a cigarette with her morning coffee, sitting in the living room and listening to the radio and, of course, with a drink. This habit continued until 1957 when she read two separate articles in the March and July issues of Readers Digest. The first linked smoking directly to lung cancer and the second shared the high rates of nicotine/tar levels.

While she didn’t quit immediately, she cut back tremendously, only smoking when she was at the local bar. She had a slight relapse when she married Richard Eckman. They liked to play cards with their adult grandchildren, enjoy cocktails and cigarettes, but by this time Leta became even less interested. The idea of lung cancer and the hacking cough she and Richard both had in the morning weighed heavily on her. When her first great-grandson was born in 1961 with allergy and asthma issues, she stopped completely. As she told Richard, she wanted to be able to hold the new baby, change him, bathe him, and most importantly, that the thought of exposing him to anything that would jeopardize his fragile health was more than she could bear.