Smokers Pipe Up
At Jim Hurwitz’s shop in Sherman Oaks, as at hundreds of others like it, the redemption of the American male quite possibly is underway.
Before joining in the praising, however, you’ll have to put health considerations aside for a time, for Hurwitz’s place is a tobacco shop.
In the last year or two, sales of pipes and pipe tobaccos at his Gus’ Smoke Shop on Ventura Boulevard have begun ticking upward. Tobacconists in other parts of the country also report the trend, for the first time this generation.
Unlike the case with cigarettes and cigars, no one keeps national aggregate figures on pipe sales, but “pipe sales have been increasing,” said Bill Fader, the Baltimore-based executive director of the Retail Tobacco Dealers of America, “especially in the case of the better, more expensive pipes, the ones that go for $100, $150, $300 and up, because they’re almost works of art.”
Along with the years-old cigar mania, this is more good news for Gus’ Smoke Shop, which has weathered many another trend, both up and down, in its seven decades.
Gus’, Hurwitz claims, was the first business to open on Ventura Boulevard and is the oldest tobacconist in Los Angeles. Founded in 1927 as Boyd’s, a store that sold candy and live chickens as well as tobacco, the business occupies its original premises.
The eponymous Gus Fender bought the store in the 1940s and sold it a couple of decades later to Norm Fudge. Hurwitz, a dedicated customer, bought it from Fudge in 1985. “I always thought Norm Fudge was Gus,” Hurwitz said. “I guess whoever is behind the counter is Gus--and now I am Gus.”
Gus’ contains two walk-in humidors for cigars and specialty cigarettes, but the dense, moist aromas of more than 30 hand-blended pipe tobaccos in large, glass jars dominate the wood-paneled store. Sweet Virginia, spicy perique, sultry Latakia--these and other leaves vie for a visitor’s olfactories. Many of the mixtures are assembled according to recipes handed down from Gus to Gus to Gus.
More than 600 pipes are arrayed on various shelves and in a glass display case. These range in price from $30 to $3,500, the latter for a massive 1960s-vintage, gold-trimmed example from famed manufacturer GBD. Many of the great names in pipes are represented--Peterson of Ireland, Stokkebye of Denmark, GBD and Ashton of England, Savinelli and Ser Jacopo of Italy.
Although some meerschaums--cool-smoking, delicate pipes of white clay--are displayed, the majority are of briar, which comes from the roots of heath trees that grow in Mediterranean locales. Mediterranean briar, properly cured and dried, is prized for its hardness and grain.
Increasingly, people buy pipes simply as objects of beauty, Hurwitz said. Some buyers don’t even smoke. The thriving business Gus’ does repairing and reconditioning vintage pipes further indicates the new collectible cachet of pipes.
The increase in pipe sales, however, is not just another manifestation of affluent American thing-gathering. A small but significant percentage of those caught up in the cigar mania, which brought on inflated prices and supply shortages, have begun to smoke pipes, Hurwitz reports. Virtually all pipe smokers are male.
Wherein lies the potential for redemption.
“Cigarette smoking is an addictive, nervous smoking, and cigar smoking has the connotation of aggressive display and success,” Hurwitz said. “Pipe smoking is more philosophical, i.e., associated with the professor type, much more laid-back. With even a very good, expensive cigar, you light it, burn it and it’s gone. But a pipe you can use for years. Pipe smoking is about the art of smoking. Everything else is about consumption.”
Hurwitz and his salesmen give new pipe smokers a short course in the fine points of the art: how to choose a style of pipe, how to load and light it, how to keep it from going out, how to break in a pipe and how to care for it.
Clearly, when a man commits to a pipe, he is committing to a form of being that values deliberateness, skill, patience and sitting more or less still for a while (it being hard to do anything requiring exertion when smoking a pipe).
Maybe the American male who has held sway the last decade and a half--the compulsive, hard-driving, fire-breathing guy on the make--is about to retire.
His successor looks like he might be a more reflective chap.
