Odd for me, who just posted a little diatribe about smoking, to be nostalgic about cigars, in which I have never indulged bar a bit of adolescent experimentation. However, a recent post in
We were discussing baseball, which is a pastime in which I’ve rarely indulged lately, either watching or participating. However, when I was a kid, on a Sunday summer afternoon at my grandparents’ house the grownups would be in the garden with a highball and us children would be either running around outside or inside watching the Red Sox baseball game. In the 60’s the Red Sox weren’t, as I remember, very successful. However, they used to have some very interesting advertisements. One of the major advertisers was White Owl cigars, and I mentioned this in my second comment. This, of course, impelled me to do a web search to see what had come of them.
Well.
I was unprepared to discover that these cigars now come in all sorts of flavours such as grape, peach (peach?), pineapple, blackberry, and strawberry. These are presumably to catch the younger generation and get them used to serious tobacco before the health warnings on the packs are intelligible to them. I’m sure that my cigar-chomping ancestors and relatives (such as my Great-Uncle Hervey, who was rarely found without a cigar in one hand and a whiskey in the other) are turning in their urns. He died at the age of 65 of a massive heart attack, natch.
White Owl seems to have been acquired by the Swedish Match Company, which also owns lots of other cigar brands, and seems bound and determined to ruin the lungs, mouths, nostrils, and gums of us all, given half the chance.
Cigar boxes were, in my youth, popular recepticles for various things such as stamps, miscellaneous papers, marbles, and the like. I don’t know where kids put such things today, except…oops, I forgot. They’re all too busy posting to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and the like to need cigar boxes in which to put miscellaneous collections of things which they now don’t bother to have anyway.
I was also startled to discover (probably I am the last in the civilised world to discover this) that cigars, eviscerated of their tobacco, are popular with the, um, weed-smoking set as a place in which to put their cannabis and smoke it. Of course, only the pushers would use real hand-rolled cigars for this; everyone else buys a box of Phillies or White Owls for this purpose.
The advertisements were quite witty for their time.
I’m sure that someone knows who the rubber-faced comedian was in this advertisement above? The reason I remember it well is that he looks a lot like my Great-Uncle Denis, and we used to make very merry over this fact.
And this one:
Sometimes not having much to do at work can be enormously interesting. Do note that ads in those days were not the 10-second wonders we have today; they went for a full minute, if not longer.
Mel Allen, the radio announcer for the Yankees, used to call home runs
White Owl Wallop or a Ballentine Blast.
In the 60’s the Red Sox weren’t, as I remember, very successful.
Except, rather famously, in 1967.
One of the major advertisers was White Owl cigars
Now this is interesting. When baseball first started being televised in the 1950s, each team, it seemed (certainly in New York) had exactly two sponsors, a beer company and a tobacco company. The Dodgers (my team of choice) advertised Schaeffer beer and Lucky Strike cigarettes. The Hated Yankees (their full name in both Brooklyn and Boston) advertised Ballantine beer and White Owl cigars. I think the Giants advertised Winstons; I don’t remember their beer.
The Red Sox (sorry I forgot about 1967; I wasn’t paying much attention) were sponsored by (I believe) Narragansett Beer, White Owl Cigars, and Atlantic Gasoline.
Remember Atlantic Gasoline? It became Arco, and then was eaten by BP.
Oh, and Narragansett Beer seems to still exist! Look here.
sorry I forgot about 1967; I wasn’t paying much attention
Well, neither was I, actually, but there have been a lot of reminders in this, the 40th anniversary year.