My grandfather Gustaf used to smoke a pipe. I remember it from my own childhood, although I don't think he usually smoked a lot in the house. But the photos above, from his photo albums, do confirm his habit. I also had a look in his old cash-books to see if I could find out when he started. In his notes from 1923-25, there are no posts mentioning tobacco of any kind. From January 1926 onward, it seems he started buying cigars now and then. (That was the year when he started working full time as a journalist...) In January and February 1928, both cigars and 'tobacco' are mentioned - but from March that year and onward, it seems he kept to pipe tobacco. However, I see no purchase of a pipe mentioned... Maybe someone gave him one for Christmas in 1927...? (Might even have been his girlfriend - my grandmother - if she preferred the smell of pipe smoke to cigars...)
The upper left photo in the collage is one of my favourites. I've shown it here before, for example for Sepia Saturday 669. It's my grandparents Sally and Gustaf in the spring of 1930 (not yet married, but engaged since the previous autumn) at the newly finished well on the plot where they built their house that spring/summer of 1930. The well was built by their future brother-in-law, Olle (engaged to Sally's sister Hildur), carpenter by trade. (To build the house itself, they hired someone else. - It's not the house in the background, that belonged to someone else.)
Linking to Sepia Saturday 714
This was a great choice for a sub-theme that I missed when looking at the Sepia Saturday image for this weekend. (yet I still managed to use it in my photos without knowing it!) In the years he was in the army my dad smoked cigars and pipes. I still have junk stored in his old cigar boxes and just yesterday came across one of his old pipes. He joined in a fad that was popular at the time with young military officers. I think cigarettes were considered a habit for enlisted men. I never like the smell of cigars but pipe tobacco was okay. The best part about my dad's smoking habit was that there was never a problem finding him a birthday or Christmas gift since stores offered a seemingly endless variety of ashtrays, lighters, tobacco jars, pipe racks, and other "tools". Thankfully he gave it up and saved his health.
ReplyDeleteI never smoked myself (and neither did my parents) but during my early years working in offices, I had to endure quite a lot of passive smoking, as it was then still common (and allowed) to smoke at work - and lots of people did. (Thankfully that has changed, and nowadays it's not allowed in restaurants etc either.)
DeleteGood to hear about the pipe smokers. I also don't mind the smell of pipe tobacco compared to cigars. But since I was (many years ago) smoking cigarettes at the time, I tried each. The cigar actually tasted better, and not the pipe - to my opinion anyway. Fortunately I quit the cigarettes and never developed pipe or cigar smoking!
ReplyDeleteBarbara, I never felt tempted to even try smoking. Before it was banned in restaurants and cafés etc here, I could hardly even visit such places because I tended to react with asthma.
DeleteGood eye on the prompt pic. Much more fun to find pix about pipe smoking than putting dead worms on rope! :) My husband smoked a pipe for a while. For our first Christmas my Mom asked me what kind of tobacco he used & I told her "Amorpha". She laughed when she discovered it was called "Amphora" - an entirely different meaning than what I'd told her. New brides have a lot to learn - including the actual name of the tobacco her new husband smokes!
ReplyDeleteNo fishermen in my family history (that I know of), so was glad to find another detail to pick up instead! :)
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