“You've got smoker's cough from smoking, brewer's droop from drinking beer”
- Industrial Disease/Dire Straits
I don't think a millennial-aged person or younger could ever conceive of how much cigarette smoke there once was in the world. It would be like trying to convince them that dinosaurs roamed the earth just forty years ago. “Sure, Grandpa,” they might say, and pat you on the head. Even having lived through it, it's sometimes difficult to recall how pervasive it was.
In the mid 1960s, 42% of people in the U.S. smoked. It's 10% today. And up through the 1980s, people smoked everywhere. They smoked at their desks at work, on airplanes, in restaurants, in bars, in hospitals, in doctor's offices, in the teacher's lounges at schools, and high schools had designated smoking areas for students. Parents smoked in cars loaded with their kids. If you went to a concert, good luck seeing the stage through the fog of smoke. It's hard for me to think of a place where smoking was forbidden back then.
I've had my share of vices in life, but for whatever reason, smoking was never one of them. My dad smoked in his younger years but he had quit by the time I came along. Mom never did, so I didn't grow up with either parent smoking. Maybe that had something to do with it. I don't know. But, apart from a few Swisher Sweets when I was out carousing with my buddies, it was just never my thing.
It was everywhere, though, and culturally you were desensitized to it. It was part of life. Who could imagine an alternative? I remember going out to bars in the 70s and 80s. When I woke up the next morning, the clothes I'd had on the night before were so thick with smoke, they could almost stand on their own. I recall flying back from Spain in 1989. There were still smoking sections on planes then. I was seated in the last row of the non-smoking section. The smoking section began right behind me. It's funny to even think that that was considered a workable idea. The woman seated behind me chain smoked for the entire nine-hour flight. She also had on some heavy sweet perfume. Let me tell ya, it was a de-light.
In undergraduate school in the mid-1980s, I had a professor who told our class that it wouldn't be long before smoking would be prohibited in all government buildings. I thought he was out of his mind. He might as well have said we would soon use fairy dust as our national currency for all the sense it made. But, sure enough, within a decade it came to pass. The rest of society gradually followed suit until we are where we are today.
It's all a good thing. We're healthier as a society, at least in that area. We're way, way unhealthier in other aspects, though. Mucho unhealthier.
So there you go, boys and girls, a little story about back in the day when the world was a very different place.
Cigarette songs. Got any?