My parents liked to go out to eat. Both worked hard outside the home, and my mom also held down the full-time job of housekeeper. On weekdays we went to Joyce’s, a few steps from the intersection of Centre and Norwegian Streets in Pottsville. For Sunday dinner, we drove out of town, though we didn’t go far. We went to Longo’s, once located on the grounds of what is today Schoeneman Beauty Supply on the Saint Clair Highway.
In some ways, I liked Longo’s. I liked the Italian food. I liked the frescoes on the wall, scenes of what may have been the Amalfi Coast or mountain villages in Sicily. As a child, I spent a lot of time contemplating the stucco homes, built so close together, much like houses in the coal region. I admired the vineyards, the olive groves, and the vine-covered terraces, where happy Italians drank and danced. I wondered if people in Italy really lived that way and thought I might like to go there some day.
After a while, I got tired of looking at the pictures. I’d finished my meal, even dessert, and I was ready to go. The adults had finished too and the waitress was clearing away their plates. This was not, however, the signal to say, “Check, please.” It was the moment to ask for another cup of coffee and light up a cigarette.
I can still remember how my heart sunk to my toes when my dad offered my mom a smoke and then lit one for himself. But don’t imagine I was worried about their health. No! For me, the cigarette, travelling from mouth to ashtray and back, was like the stroke of a metronome moving to an excruciatingly slow beat.
One cigarette, then another, often a third. I watched them. They were enjoying themselves, slowly drawing on their cigarettes. My sisters and I waited. We could not go out to play. The restaurant was on the edge of a busy highway. It was too dangerous. Instead, we sat, seen but not heard, and breathed in all that secondary smoke, without a care for our health.
Back in the early 1960’s, in my little world, nearly every adult smoked. My parents belonged to a generation encouraged to light up. Doctors and dentists claimed cigarettes would protect smokers’ throats and teeth. In an ad from the 1950’s, actor Ronald Reagan declared Chesterfields the “merriest” Christmas gift around. At the corner grocery store, we kids bought packages of candy cigarettes.
Then came the 1964 Surgeon General’s report, the first on the hazards of smoking. I can still recall some of the first anti-smoking campaigns, one built around the popular standard “Smoke gets in your eyes.”
I was a kid who worried. I started worrying about my parents and smoking. I wanted them to stop.
My mom did. She was never a real smoker. She had a cigarette after a meal, to keep my father company. My father, on the other hand, went through two packs a day. Our house smelled like smoke and when he was home, we walked through billows floating in the air.
In 1968, four years after the Surgeon General’s first report, my father died. From where I sit today, I know he was a young man, 48 years old. In that death, cigarettes played a big role.
I’ve never smoked. Oh sure, I tried a cigarette or two when I was young. I actually smoked in my father’s presence. A friend of his offered me a Kool. I liked the menthol taste, liked feeling grown-up, but that was before my father died.
Most of my adult life, I was a crusader, a cigarette-hater, intolerant of cigarette smoke. I cheered every piece of legislation that chased smokers to the peripheries of daily life: no more smoking in movie theaters, busses or airplanes. Then smokers could no longer light up in restaurants. Finally, cigarettes were banned in bars!
Reading up on the anti-smoking laws in Pennsylvania, I’ve discovered that in some counties, authorities have even instituted bans on smoking in public housing. A man’s home used to be his castle. Now, during a long, cold PA winter, if he is a smoker and happens to be renting from the state, he’ll have to go sit on a bench in the snow to enjoy a cigarette.
According to 2016 figures, nearly 35% of French men and women between the ages of 15 and 75 smoke. In the USA, the figure is about 15%.
In France, there are frequent anti-smoking campaigns. Packs of cigarettes and pouches of tobacco are stamped with messages such as “Smoking kills,” or “Smoking can damage sperm and reduce fertility.” There are also photos worthy of horror films, the kind of image that makes a non-smoker cry, “Get behind me, Satan!” They are truly evil-looking things.
The latest move by the government of President Macron is to push the price of cigarettes up to ten euros. It will increase by increments, and by 2020, the goal will be reached: $12.50 for 20 cigarettes. Today the price is about $8.50, equivalent to what Pennsylvania smokers are paying in 2018.
An anti-smoking fanatic like me should be cheering. But I am not. Since I’ve moved to the country, my attitude towards smoking has changed. In Paris, I didn’t have a single friend who smoked. In le Perche, I know several people who do. Some are retired, living on very limited incomes. Others work long hard hours. Few of them go on the kind of vacations my Parisian friends so often take. In fact, few of them go on vacation at all.
Smoking is their pleasure, their little luxury. It is also their means for controlling stress; for many, it is an addiction they’d like to overcome, but they do not know how.
They fit in with the statistics: they are of what’s called a “low socio-economic background,” less educated, unqualified for high-paying jobs. Many have worked since they were teenagers, some from as young as 12 years old.
They are the people whom President Macron seems to be leaving behind as he sets out on an ambitious program of reforms to “make France great again” (sound familiar?).
I say, help my new friends and acquaintances move up the socio-economic ladder, provide them with the counselling they need to break addiction, or please, let them enjoy a smoke.
