I stopped smoking cigarettes at age 11 out of spite | Opinion

Robert J. Booker
Updated ·3 min read

I spent quite a few days of my young life smoking. From the time I was 9 years old until I was about 13 I smoked various kinds of materials, but I never learned to inhale. Our neighborhood had catalpa trees everywhere and their "Indian cigars" were hanging there for the taking as soon as they dried out and turned brown. For some reason our parents had no real objection to our puffing on them.

But those cigars were not enough. We had to experiment with real tobacco. I was always careful not to buy cigarettes in my neighborhood, where I was known, but went seven blocks away to the Royal Peanut Company at the corner of Jackson and Central. There I could buy cigarettes for a penny each without question. Although any brand would do, it was especially enjoyable to puff on a Kool Cigarette with its menthol taste.

I was also careful not to smoke in a place I would be recognized. I remember walking and smoking in an alley one day when a drunk man asked, "Do yo' mama know you is smokin' that cigarette?" I hurriedly walked away from there, hoping he did not know who I was. That scene helped reinforce the fact that everybody in the village had concern for the youths.

Bob Booker smoked penny cigarettes, preferably menthol, until his mother caught him when he was 11.
Bob Booker smoked penny cigarettes, preferably menthol, until his mother caught him when he was 11.

There was one man in the neighborhood, however, who delighted in encouraging our delinquency. Mr. Leon, who lived on Florida Street, was a working man who usually had a bunch of skinny cigars. He would give them to four or five of us and we would puff on them until we got dizzy or sick. I believe he stocked up just to share with us.

I have no idea why the slender, beanlike pods of the catalpa tree were called Indian cigars, but they were not easy on the throat or tongue. After a few minutes of puffing on one I had a sore throat and burning tongue, but that was a part of departing from the ordinary activities of youth.

When I was 11 years old I stopped smoking cigarettes out of spite. One day my mother caught me smoking one behind the coal house and said I was too young. She said when I turned 14 I had her permission to smoke. When I reached 14, I proved to her that I did not have to smoke cigarettes and never did.

In 1962 when I bought a little red Corvair, I thought it would be cool to tool around with a pipe in my mouth. At the age of 27 I tried several kinds of good-smelling tobacco, but they all burned my tongue. Although the habit may have been stylish, those pipes were no more pleasant than the Indian cigars.

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Before my teen years I saw many movies in which the characters smoked, especially in the gangster movies, but I don't believe I was influenced by them. As I watched the Westerns I saw some of them rolling tobacco, but I never saw my favorites, Johnny Mack Brown orHopalong Cassidy, smoke or drink.

My desire to smoke, perhaps, developed when I was 5 or 6 years old. I remember visiting the home of Walter Gary, an older man and family friend who always had a good tobacco smell in his house. I never saw him smoke anything, but that great aroma was always there.

Robert J. Booker is a freelance writer and former executive director of the Beck Cultural Exchange Center. He may be reached at 865-546-1576.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Opinion: I stopped smoking cigarettes at age 11 out of spite