Did Your Dad Stick to One Tobacco? Did that make us better?

...interesting points, regarding your life...not all, but most pipe smokers in the 50's- seemed to be completely satisfied with one pipe tobacco...my Uncle, like your Dad, smoked SWR his entire life...

My dad was a cigarette smoker into his 40s before quiting. I can't recall what he smoked. My Grandpa, on Dad's side, smoked handrolled Prince Albert cigarettes. Might be why I like PA. My routine with Dad was gettng up early to have coffee and watch the Lone Ranger and Cisco Kid before he headed off to work and I went to school.

My dad was also a dedicated SWR smoker all his life.

My dad never smoked a pipe..he never smoked a cigarette and maybe smoked a cigar every 5 years. My dad's dad ( long story why not considered grandfather) chain smoked camels. My grand father never smoked but my great grand father did smoke a pipe and I think he smoked either Edgeworth ready rubbed or Granger pipe tobacco because I have vague memories of a blue or black tin..yes TIN of tobacco next to his chair.

Very7 interesting topic.  I'll give a slightly different approach.

Growing up in the 1950's in the San Fernando Valley could be pretty idyllic.  My parents were part of the post war migration to California.  Housing was abundant and very affordable and well paying jobs were plentiful.  All kind of the opposite of what it is now.  At that time there were still orchards and ranches in the valley.  Helms bakery trucks brought fresh baked goods right to your door. Giacapuzzi dairy delivered milk, soda water, and syrups.  We played in the streets and didn't get run over, at least not often.  People from the ranches sometimes brought pony rides into the neighborhood.  Everyone peed in the community pool.  When we put in a pool in the backyard, everybody was my friend.

My father was an aerospace engineer, and aerospace was the dominant industry in SoCal at that time.  He worked for several companies, the longest being at Garrett AirResearch, where he worked for 40 years.  That Pop was hired to work at Garrett was pretty amazing.  Clifford Garrett was a born again Christian zealot who believed that Jews were damned to eternal damnation, and were the spawn of the devil.  But he liked money as much as he liked anything and he saw gold in Pop, so Pop crossed the color line, becoming something of a pioneer for that time in the very early 1950's and eventually became a department chair with his own laboratory.  Many days he worked long hours, leaving at 6 AM and returning around 10 PM.  A few days of the week he would make it home for dinner by 6.  So home, slippers, pipe, etc wasn't part of the equation.

Pop wasn't a smoker.  There was the occasional foray with a cigarette once in a while, and he like cigars, especially if they were cheap.  With 5 kids to support there were few luxuries, and tobacco certainly qualified as that.  Later, when all the scrimping and saving and sacrifice to put two nickels together to invest finally paid off, Pop allowed himself the luxury of a better quality cigar from time to time.  Pop did have a humidor filled with Cuban cigars that were shipped to him by a shop in London through arrangements made while he was there on business.  To get these through Customs, the bands were switched for Jamaican and the original bands mailed out separately.  Yes, Pop ran the blockade.

"Leave It To Beaver" was something we watched, not something we experienced.  That show and others like it that promoted an unrealistic and largely unobtainable picture of family life, probably caused more dissatisfaction, drunkenness, dysfunction and domestic violence than just about anything else.  Still, we never missed an episode, and I even got to meet the Beaver at a public appearance. 

Nope, "Leave It To Beaver" was pure fiction, but "The Bickersons" was much more like life as I knew it.  My folks were together for 73 years and the last 15 of them were actually pretty good.  They finally got sick of tearing each other apart and had a good and loving marriage.  It just took them 58 years to get there.  Go figure.

So I can't say that my love for pipes and tobaccos came from Pop.  He was a very seldom smoker, and only of cigars.  My upbringing did give me a strong distaste for confrontations, having witnessed so many of them,  but also a beserker element that occasionally came into play with people too stupid to walk away from me when I walked away from them.

So there's a different spin of childhood, Beaver, and smoking fathers.

Did Ward Cleaver smoke a pipe?

I watched Leave to Beaver reruns every day after school when I was a kid. For me it was something neither lived nor wished for, but a window into a surreal world of kids who called their dads "sir", mothers who didn't work and wore high heels and pearl necklaces in the kitchen, and kids who could wander at will and hang around homeless people and random old guys on the docks without fear of getting raped, arrested, or murdered! It was just as strange and foreign to us as watching a Turkish soap opera or reading a National Geographic about a Papua New Guinea cargo cult.   

I have noticed that the generations before mine were very "this is my brand". Be it pipe, cigar, cigarettes, beer, or whiskey. A lot of folks I knew had a brand and wouldn't stray from it. One guy I knew from my grandpas generation only smoked Bugler. He would go without rather than smoke anything else. I seemed to be a point of loyalty. I think as long as someone finds joy in their brand, then they're doing it right.

As billyklubb mentioned it seemed there used to be die hard brand loyalists that we don't have so much today. My grandfather stopped smoking pipes, cigarettes, and cigars cold turkey right before I was born and a few years ago he gave me all his pipes. I never once saw him smoke but have sat down and asked him many questions. He primarily smoked Prince Albert and Velvet pocket tins. He thought Prince Albert was just about the best and Velvet was as smooth and sweet as velvet. He smoked all day, every waking minute from the second of waling up until he was asleep he said. When he smoked, he smoked. He didn't really remember smoking other tobaccos too often and couldn't remember if he had ever heard of Three Nuns, Edgeworth, etc. although I'm sure he did at one point and just never smoked them. He did say he didn't ever care for Carter Hall. My grandpa seemed throughout my life, mostly raised by my grandparents, with both my parents working full time nonstop, like he would've been one of those one or two pipe loyalists and seemed he would have smoked one brand, but it wasn't the case. I got somewhere around 14 pipes from him ranging from several Dr. Grabows, Medicos, and Kaywoodies, to Gefapips and Pioneer meerschaums and a nice Savinelli Oom Paul.
I know he also smoked cigarettes and cigars before he said cigars started getting more and more expensive. He also never drank just one kind of whiskey, just one brand of a beer, or just one brand of tool. His loyalist mentality was always American. (Notice certain things didn't have to be American made, like higher end pipes) Everything had to absolutely be American made. He retired from General Motors.

I think people that drink just one brand of beer like the "Natural Ice" drinkers, or smoked only one brand of tobacco aren't really living life, but that's all I'll say about that, and I don't mean it as offensive. There are too many excellent choices out there to just drink swill (or smoke it). You only live once and I like to live life to the fullest. I don't want to look back and think about how boring I was and shouldn't have been.

I grew up in the 80s. My parents dabbled with cigarettes before I was born. But despite my dad's service in the Navy during Vietnam, by the time I came along my parents were vehemently anti smoking. My mom hated when her relatives would come over for the holidays and smoke in her house. I remember the year she put her foot down, she bought a pin with the classic red circle crossing out a cigarette to wear on Christmas eve.

But my father's favorite books were the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and he read them to me as a kid. I'd be lying if I said they didn't romanticize pipe smoking for me. As for Leave it to Beaver, well besides watching the reruns every once in a while it was foreign to me as Chico mentioned. As a teenager I was much more inclined to relate with Bob Dobbs whose likeness is anecdotally based on Ward Clever, pipe and all.

In my 20s I had a boyfriend, and his family would hold spectacular parties. When you arrived there were cocktails made in a shaker and served in fancy glasses. During dinner his dad poured wine from his extensive wine cellar. After dinner drinks like Drambuie and Frangelica were sipped by the fireplace. So this was the setting in which I finally experienced pipe smoking in person. One year at New Year's his dad pulled out some pipes and the obligatory cherry tobacco to share. I never saw him smoke a pipe at any other time, I think it was more about the atmosphere for him than something he did regularly. But that first pipe I smoked, paired with Drambuie while I was half drunk was sublime. I actually ran into the old man about a month ago and I said hi to him. It didn't feel quite appropriate to explain to him at that moment that he inadvertently started me smoking pipes, but it was certainly on my mind as I chatted with him.

Just speculation....

Many of our parents can out of the depression, I can imagine that most through financial necessity smoked what we would call otc blends. A simpler time, finances and availability probably played into their contentment with one blend... There is a lot to be said for contentment with one blend, it sure simplifies cellaring.

All my grandpa smoked was King Albert, and a few cigs a day...My dad smoked 3 packs of PallMall no filter for his whole life.

Great story, Jesse