A plug of tabacky..see post #35

[Drm50]

Some years back, me and two buddies went spring bear hunting
in northern Ontario. We were eating lunch in a small town that
was left over from 1890s gold boom. On the dash we had a carton of Redman, several candy bars, and buddy's sunglasses.
We came out of restaurant picking our teeth, as we got into
Bronco we noticed everything that had been on dash was gone.
We wrote it off as luck that our gear in back was still there. We
had been going to this same town for years and never had a
thing stolen. Anyway we were on our way back to camp, about
1/4 mile down the road we came across about 1/2 dozen boys
12-13 year olds. Some of them were hanging on sides of a Bailey
bridge, losing their lunch. One kid had my buddy's sunglasses
on. We didn't stop, we figured they suffered enough. They found
out RedMan & Snickers do not mix well.

 

[soFlaNative]

I don't have many vices left, but to indulge with a good cigar now and then, well...I recon I just got to have some vice to tell myself I'm still a bad feller. But somehow taking a plug of tabacky to relax with, and call it my remaining vice just doesn't seem right.

Along the lines of having a vice or three remaining, I can't say I'm the best when it comes to healthy eating...Fried greasy foods still hits the spot with me...Fruits and veggies, not so much. So I suppose a person could call that a vice.



WuzzFuzz

"My experience has taught me that a man who has no vices has very few virtues."

A. Lincoln

 

[Kinman]

I messed around with cigarettes as a teenager and smoked them off and on for around 30 years or so. Whenever I quit smoking I would go back to chewing, I loved chewing tobacco. I loved Brown's Mule, Days O Work, Beech Nut and Red Man. I think I liked cut plug the best. I also liked snoose and would prefer Skoal over Cope but never turned Cope down when offered a pinch. My dentist scared me with some pictures of a deputy he was working on...never chewed since. I also smoked good cigars, never did care for cheap stinkers anymore than a cheap cigarette. I got to where I was paying around 5 bucks apiece for a good cigar and decided to give that up when I quite tobacco for good around 10 years ago. I still hanker for a good cigar and a chew from time to time, still love the smell of a good cigar. I know that smoking a cigar or savoring some chew would either make me ill or start me on my merry way a chewin and spittin.

 

[BC38]

Started on chewing tobacco at 10 years old or so, working in the hayfields. Red Man or Beech Nut mostly. By the time I was 12 I was smoking cigarettes and smoked around a half pack a day for the next 35 years or so. The last few years I smoked cigars and at the very end I was smoking a pipe.

Gave it all up 2 years ago. Still smells good though, but the only way I would ever go back to it is if I were terminally ill. In that case I might even go back to having a drink or three (I've been sober for almost 32 years now). At that point what have you got to lose, right?

 

[wbraswell]

I had very similar experience with Beech-Nut when I was a teenager. I couldn't spit enough of that stuff out. I smoked from 15 until I was 40. When my blood pressure started going up, I went to the doctor, he told me to quit, I did. Period. I just laid my pack on a shelf and left them there. I had no idea how nasty and vile the habit was. I can be around it in a bar, but I can't put that shirt back on the next day. I hate tobacco now, mainly because I hate the tobacco companies and the lies and deception they thrive on. They still don't admit the damage their products do to the body. I cannot imagine why anyone willingly takes any kind of smoke into their lungs for any purpose now. And with it's tarnished image, I sure don't understand why young people continue to start.

 

[GatorFarmer]

One thing that I should add about pipe tobacco...a great many people are not offended by the smell. Many find it pleasant.Not my wife though. She can't stand to be around it. Thus I smoke quite a bit.

 

[Chipmunk6]

I remember in about '65 or so, Pop built
our garage and tranferred everything from the shed into it.
Roundabout '98, I was scouring the place for spring that went
flying and found an old dusty toolbox. Pop said he hadn't
seen that box since the days of the old shed. We opened
it up and he found a partial plug of his favorite chew,
Black Mariah, he cut about a 1/16" of dried out stuff off
of it and popped the rest in his mouth. He swore up and
down it was still good as ever. Sittin here looking at his
old knife...Damn I miss him.
Chipmunk6

 

[Old 44 Guy]

I've been chewing Skoal since 1955. Beechnut before while baling hay in '48. Had to quit chewing & drinking 2 years ago. Stayed with it till last year. Hell, at 84 I decieded to Hell with it. Smoked for 19 years & quit that in 1974. Still enjoyed a chew now & then. Now using "Snus". wintergreen. A can lasts me 2 days.

 

[Mainsail]

I remember back in the early 2000s cigars suddenly became very hip and trendy. Our crew was doing a post-flight dinner in a bar somewhere overseas and a couple of pilots pulled out their cigars and began smoking them. One of the crusty old enlisted guys shook his head in disgust and got up to leave, muttering, "Anybody that'd put one of them things in their mouth should have no problem ******* another man's ****."

I think that spoiled their smoke.

 

[Frank46]

Stopped smoking when my first daughter was born. Since I worked in a fuel oil tank farm you couldn't smoke. Tried skoal long cut wintergreen and have been with it a long time. Bet they are still finding my empty skoal cans all over the place. Frank

 

[venomballistics]

I switched to vapor after several years of external combustion.

yes, it's a Chinese invention, but, so was gunpowder. They get it right every few hundred years

 

[model70hunter]

I have smoked cigs and pipes off and on since my 20's. Thats 40 some years.

Chewed once and only once. When I was 16 a friend was 15, his Dad said if you boys want to hunt you can use my truck. My pal had never been I was a seasoned veteran with bucks and does to my credit.

I drove over to his house way before daylight. Hios mom said shed pack lunches and there was a grocery sack of sandwiches, soda, candy, chips etc.

I was in a hurry, he got dressed and out the door we flew. I put him on a stand and said I'll pick you up for lunch. When we got to the truck we realized we forgot the food in our haste. We were 30 miles from home out on the national forest.

His dad was a rural mail carrier, chewed dry twist constantly, non-stop and all the time. Go to church, school etc he'd have the recently drank Orange Crush bottle to spit in. He could drink his soda around the chew.

His car had the old crank out vent windows. He got a new one every 3 years. Rural carriers drove from the passenger side. He'd crank open the passenger vent and spit towards it. In shot time it was glued open with the chew.

All we found in his Daddy's truck was a new stick of this weld-dry twist chew. 50 some years later I remember it, funny or perhaps sad how some things stay with you. The chew was in a cellophane wrapper, it was one piece but bent in the middle. It had all the appearances of dog poop. WE were hungry and decided it would tide us over till dinner.

It ended up being a tidal wave. we turned purple and immediately a ghostly green, the same green shade that zombies wear with pride.
I remember us splattering deer country with breakfast. We didn't do our business quietly, nope we sounded like a couple of hacking moose with pnumonia.

When we found out we might survive we did not go back out to hunt, slid on home early. My Pal bailed on me the next day, I got a nice 8 point basket racked buck.

When I was in the service I once got pretty snockered, I threw up bad. The only difference between the 2 was alcohol did'nt turn me green.

 

[SmokeStack Lightning]

My Grandaddy who grew and sold tabacco in the eastern hills of Kentucky would take a raw leaf, devein it, then roll it into a oval plug.

He would cut a peice off his home grown then pull out a plug of "Days Work" (commercially made "plug" tabacco, heavy on the molasses) then chew both at the same time.

He owned 600 acres, about 200 acres which was "bottom-land" which he planted in crops to feed his livestock and family, the rest being wooded hills.

Died when he was 96, farmed until well into his 70's and never owned a tractor, just a team of mules, Jim and Jewel.

 

[Kinman]

I think the "thing" about chewing that many find appealing is the whole chewing thing, its almost like eatin. Chewin tobacco is different from dippin stuff. If I was chewin I wouldn't let the cud rest for very long before giving it a chew, which usually involved a sort of a cheek squeeze and some kind of movement to roll it around a bit. After the major flavor had kinda worn off I quit spittin and just swallowed like normal as if I didn't have it in there. With dippin tobacco I would get that pinch or small wad fixed in my lip that developed a pouch and only spit a couple of times to kind of get the cud settled in and all the little bits cleaned out then settle in for the first swallow of the day. I don't care how many years I dipped snoose that first swallow of the day was always an eye-opener. Dippin snoose had the extra added benefit of keeping me regular as clockwork, within an hour or so of that first swallow would usually require a trip to the office. How many of you snoose dippers would drink beer with your cud in and wonder where it kept going? Hey I thought I just took a dip...I remember working with some young guys before I retired, those boys would take a dip that required two fingers and a thumb, go through a can and half a day, they actually complained about the price of Skoal and dipped the cut-rate stuff. I also noticed those boys spit alot more as if they were chewing leaf or cut plug, I mentioned that they oughta learn to swallow, that their chew would go alot further...they looked at me like I was from Mars.
My ole granddad used to keep a coffee can next to his easy chair, that was his spittoon, my wife wouldn't let me get away with that.
There have been some famous tobacco chewers, Edison was one of them...he refused to use a spitton and just spit all over the floor of his lab. I remember when I was a kid growing up in Utah that there was a story about ole Brigham Young. It seems that before a certain time there was no problem with chewing tobacco in the church. I was never a member of the church but I had to respect the man for his far-sighted vision about wide streets and storm drains, viable irrigation canals, he was a very smart man. According to the legend I heard from the grandson of David O. McKay it seems that one day Bro. Young pulled his plug of tobacco out of his back pocket and went to slice off an ample chew when something came over his countenance. He dropped the slice of tobacco onto the ground, put away his pocket knife and put the plug back into his back pocket. It seems that he decided at that very time that the tobacco had some sort of control over him, he continued to carry the plug in his back pocket for a length of time and whenever the desire to cut a slice off would come over him he would take the plug out of his back pocket, hold it out in front of him and say "Who is stronger, me or thee." Whereupon he would take the plug and put it back in his pocket, never to use it again for the rest of his life. I believe it was at that eary time in history that the spittoons were removed from church or it could even have been before the temple's construction. I always like that story...

 

[WuzzFuzz]

Ok fellers, help me out on this one.

Kinman made mention of the LDS having spittoons back when....But was it just a regional thing, state or city?...But if I recall, any public place had to have a spittoon for each 25 people of occupancy?????

I do remember the two taverns in town when I grew up still had spittoons...They were under the bar rail...For a long long time, I had one of those spittoons. It was metal, with porcelain center....I had it for the longest time, and I just used it as a ash tray at home...I have no idea where it is now, after the moves I've made over the years.

My question is, was it required to have a spittoon in any pubic place. department store, cafe, bar, court house, any public place?????\


WuzzFuzz


History of Salem, Virginia


I did find this little tid bit while searching.....It was "REQUIRED Feb 5-1903, in Salem anyway....


The White House had to have some spittoons. Kind of figures that it was during Andrew Jackson's tenure.

1829 completion under Jackson

The East Room was finally completed and decorated in 1829 by Andrew Jackson. New plaster work in the form of a cornice-line frieze of anthemion (a flowerlike, traditional Greek decorative pattern) was installed,[4] three Neoclassical plasterwork medallions affixed to the ceiling,[29] and the demi-lune over the east wall's Venetian window removed and turned into a wall.[4] Decorative wooden beams were added to the ceiling,[30] and two of the east-facing windows were blocked off and fireplaces with black Italian marble mantelpieces installed in their place.[4] The Jackson administration turned to French-born American importer Louis Veron of Philadelphia for assistance in furnishing the executive mansion. Veron was one of the first merchants to display items from a wide range of suppliers in a showroom, rather than manufacture the items himself. Nearly all the 1829 furnishings for the East Room were supplied by Veron.[28] Veron also added gilt rays and stars over the west door (the one the president usually used when entering the room).[31]

The bare walls were covered with yellow wallpaper with cloth edging, light-blue moreen drapes added to the windows,[28][a][32] and plaster cornices adorned with eagles installed over the windows.[16] The 1818 Monroe furniture was upholstered,[18] and a 500-square-foot (46 m2) carpet woven in Brussels,[33][16] three large mahogany tables topped with marble, and four white marble-topped pier tables placed in the room.[34][33][31][35][c][28][34] For lighting, Veron provided several astral and mantel lamps.[28][d][36] Gilded bronze wall brackets for hanging lamps and candles were attached to the walls.[28]

Jackson also purchased three cut-glass chandeliers to light the room.[37][33] Each chandelier, which featured 18 whale oil lamps, hung from the ceiling medallions and were complimented with whale oil wall sconces and table lamps.[29][e][28] There were also 20 spittoons.[30] His expenditures totaled $9,358.27,[31] provided by a friendly Congress eager to make the White House a more elegant symbol of the nation.[33][f][30]

The East Room's original 18-lamp chandeliers were removed by Jackson in 1834 and placed in the State and Family Dining Rooms. Veron supplied the East Room with a more luxurious set.[28]


WuzzFuzz

 

[SmokeStack Lightning]

When I was about 16 my Pop took down to Pap-paw's farm near "Bonanza, Ky." during tobacco harvesting time.

3 of my uncles were in the field with tabacco knives cutting the ripe leaves, another uncle drove the team of mules with a hand built wagon attached picking up the cut leaves to be dried.

The wagon would come into the "Tabacco Curing Barn" where the leaves would be spread out and graded.

The leaves would then be hung upside down after being pushed onto "Tabacco Poles" (2"x2" hand hewn 8'-0" locusts poles sharpened to a point on both ends so the leading stems of the leaves could be pushed onto) then stored on racks suspended up to 60'-0" in the air.

We would start at the top of drying barn placing the loaded poles onto the drying racks until the racks were full, then move down a tier.

Walking between racks was accomplished by crossing a 2"x8" board.

The drying barn had been built in the late 1800's and the exterior walls had 2" gaps between the boards as to allow good air circulation.

I'll never forget the aroma of all that tabacco hanging there being dried and making it real easy for me and my cousins to have an endless supply of chewing and smoking tobacco.