How many cigarettes did I inadvertently smoke as a child? I often wonder this. I’m talking of course about the secondhand smokes. In the years before I ever actually blazed one up and cautiously inhaled — brief titillation kicked in the throat by an eruption of panicked coughing – I wonder how many packs I effortlessly sucked down without even knowing it. Also, did I look cool doing it?
There were the listless afternoons spent watching TV in our bright but cramped back room. Lounging sideways, legs draped over the arm of one of our old gold silk easy chairs, I’d spend hours watching Andy Griffith or Bewitched or The Partridge Family on our 25-inch RCA console television set. Not infrequently, one or another of my older brothers was reclining nearby, sucking down a Tareyton or a Winston like it was their job. I remember them launching playful smoke rings across the room which no doubt silently unfurled into my mouth and nasal cavity as I giggled at one of Barney Fife’s or Dr. Bombay’s or Rueben Kincaid’s hilarious quips. Perhaps I was high on the nicotine.
Even at a young age, I was a student of cultural trivia of every kind, and one of my favorite pastimes was examining the fine print of cigarette ads in magazines to unearth the tar count in each brand of cigarette. It was not lost on me that the tar counts of Tareyton and Winston smokes were 21 and 20 mg respectively – the highest counts of any cigarettes at the time. Was it purely coincidental that my brothers chose the two most lethal brands on the market, or had they too run the numbers and chosen to go for broke? Either way, I was quietly in awe of them for achieving such lofty goals.
There were the Wednesday evening trips to and from choir practice at Calvin Sinclair Church, that always began with a Norman Rockwell innocence. As Choir Director and ostensible leader of the pack, my dad would chauffeur anywhere from one to three of the more senior choir members, stopping at each of their homes to pick them up. As he manned the helm of our steel blue ’71 Impala with Mom beside him, I would slouch in the cavernous blue vinyl of the back seat, sliding side to side with every turn.
On a full night, we’d first swing by Virginia Olmstead’s place just a few blocks away on Higley Avenue. Virgina’s maiden name was DeFore, and she, along with her younger brother Clifford –were famous on the Calvin Sinclair scene for being the lesser-known siblings of actor Don DeFore. Don had made his fortune playing, among other characters, George Baxter, the head of the household in which Hazel – everyone’s favorite loudmouth maid – was employed in the show of the same name. Never mind that few outside of Cedar Rapids remembered DeFore’s Hollywood reign, he was a hometown hero and his sister Virginia consistently represented the family with a quiet dignity, never a coiffed salt and pepper hair out of place and usually resplendent in a smart lavender or light blue shirtwaist dress with sensible shoes. She was always friendly, kind, and appreciative of the ride, yet somehow aloof and distant, as kin to royalty can sometimes be.
Virginia would elegantly climb into the back seat, pat me on the knee with a gentle hello and we’d head over to the Oak Hill neighborhood to retrieve Esther Gosnell from her dainty story-and-a-half bungalow, perched on a hill overlooking the Cargill corn starch plant and, beyond that, the Cedar River. Royalty in her own right, Esther was considered “the Queen of the Church Potluck,” always going above and beyond all comers to whip up more and better dishes for the occasional post-Sunday service event. Whether it was Chicken Tetrazzini with a crumbled potato chip topping or a 7-Up and sour cream Jello salad, Esther deftly cranked out the largest quantities of the unhealthiest foods known to man. Her chronic physical conditions were a testament to her sampling resume: she had bad knees, bad hips, bad ankles and, without going into too much detail, the passenger seat of more than one of our cars was later determined to have broken springs. Nevertheless, Esther always plopped into the front seat next to Mom with good-natured, albeit breathless, cheer.
Next up, we’d backtrack over to the alley behind Bever Avenue to gather none other than crotchety senior extraordinaire, Cortland “Scoop” Stevens. While Virginia and Esther were most likely in their late fifties or early sixties at the time, I actually have no idea how old Scoop was. Let’s just say he was somewhere between 75 and whatever 75 squared is. I don’t know why we always picked him up in the alley behind his house, but the venue seemed fitting. I remember Scoop for his full head of Vitalis-slicked graying hair neatly perched atop his deeply creased and angular face, his stooped and lanky sideways gate as he hobbled toward our vehicle, and the inches-thick horn-rimmed glasses he wore, making his sunken eyes appear at least 4 times their actual size. But mostly I remember him for how he filled our car with cigarette smoke once he’d completed his painfully clattering journey into the backseat.
“How you doin’, Scoop?”, my dad would always say.
“What’s that?”, would come the inevitable phlegmy croak.
“I say, how you doin’?”
“Yeah. Good.”
Scoop was smoking when he climbed in, had been smoking long before that — most likely from birth on — and continued to smoke all the way to church. Scoop was made of cigarette smoke. And the windows could’ve been up or down, it didn’t matter – for the next 15 minutes, we would be, all of us, fully immersed in the stinging, smoky Scoop-ness of a thousand VFW halls. What began each Wednesday evening with such refined purity — Virginia bathed in rosewater perfume, Dad in his English Leather, Mom in her Wind Song, Esther with her essence of twice-baked potatoes and me with my somewhat-virginal lung capacity – always ended with us piling out into the church parking lot, a clown car of well-dressed chimney sweeps. Each of us now black lung-adjacent, we’d take a moment to allow the fresh air to penetrate and cleanse our clothing — partially undoing the damage that could be undone — before entering the church refreshed and ready to belt out the good lord’s greatest hits.
To be cont’d
City of Five Smells 