No-Smoking Ad Is Sign From Above

There are many reasons I’m glad I no longer smoke, but one more never hurts. It will be unveiled next week on the only billboard in Moorpark.

I have no problem with anti-tobacco diatribes, having written a few myself. Even years ago, when I was hacking my way through two packs a day, I was OK with the perennial carping of small-minded people about trivial matters like an unspeakably grotesque and painful death.

But the most fearsome thing about the anti-tobacco message to be writ in big letters over Moorpark is that it was conceived by two seventh-graders--and when it comes to decrying human frailty, no one can be more brutally direct than the very young.

Teenagers may be lighting up all over the place, but suburban grade-school children are highly concerned, vigorously opposed, and altogether not amused.

When my daughter was in fourth grade or so, she was in the full bloom of juvenile anti-tobacco indignation.

She once confronted an elderly puffer in a restaurant. In the most acid tones available to an 8-year-old, she said, “Don’t you know you’ll get black lung from that?”

The man just stared at her. How unbearably cute, he must have thought.

In Moorpark, the message will be twice as in-your-face.

Two designs will adorn the billboard downtown at Moorpark Road and Poindexter Avenue.

One is by Sean Storms, a 12-year-old student at Mesa Verde Middle School. It depicts a cigarette crushing the daylights out of a person who is horizontal, probably for good. It says: “Put it out before it puts you out!”

Sean’s ad shares a split-screen with “Come to Death Country” by his classmate, 13-year-old Ryan Zastrow. Ryan drew a skeletal cowboy on a skeletal horse prancing through a toxic-looking smoke cloud.

“I tried to make smoking not very cool-looking,” Ryan said. “I was just trying to make people think that if it does the same thing to you on the outside that it does on the inside, would they still smoke?”

The boys’ brush with Madison Avenue started with a class assignment.

Just as they do every semester, health teachers Dyan McIntosh and Cynthia Kahle had their students spoof cigarette ads. This comes after the videos of people talking through artificial larynxes, the vivid photos of diseased lungs and the discussion about the 4,000 chemicals used to process tobacco.

“The kids get pretty grossed out,” said Kahle.

Not surprisingly, the spoof assignment brings out plenty of Grim Reapers, tombstones, skulls-and-crossbones and malevolent curls of smoke.

“She’s going to Capri and never coming back,” reads the headline on one real magazine ad.

“She’s hooked on Capri and she’s never coming back,” reads the headline on the student parody.

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The difference in this year’s assignment was that the students also had to write letters to the Eller Media Co., which owns Moorpark’s billboard. Once home to Joe Camel, the space recently had been plastered with a state-funded anti-smoking ad featuring two cowpokes on horses. One of them plaintively said: “I miss my lung, Bob.”

“I was stoked,” said McIntosh. “I was just thrilled to see that, so I told my students we should write them thank-you notes.”

Eller, the world’s biggest billboard company, was gratified.

Of course, you don’t get to be the world’s biggest billboard company without knowing a thing or two about publicity. Just as it has elsewhere, Eller embraced the students’ suggestion that one or two of their efforts be mounted as well.

On Monday, the Storms-Zastrow one-two anti-smoking punch will go up for two weeks to a month. The boys--and everyone else in town--will see their work looming over the neighborhood.

On April 22, a ban on cigarette advertising in California takes effect.

“I can argue censorship both ways, but it’s just good that the kids aren’t smoking,” said Ed Dato, the Eller vice president who approved the Moorpark anti-tobacco project. “I smoked for 25 years, and it did me no good.”

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Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.