Father's Lucky Strike

My father smoked a bit, and well controlled by frugal financial adjustments as he had 7 children to feed and a very frugal aging father who also smoked a bit. Cigarette smoking was a kind of habit for these two men. I remember them sharing time and cigarettes in the backyard as they discussed things. They had plenty to talk about.




Though I cannot remember what brand my grandfather smoked, I suppose any brand would do for him. In those days when men met, they would extend their cigarette packets to offer a cigarette to a friend as a gesture of friendship. As a child I thought that it was a very interesting gesture.

However, my father insisted on Lucky Strike because he said that it had more tobacco. He sometimes would decline people's offer and he would take out his own...while others would not accept his Lucky Strike because they said that the cigarette was too "strong" or kau. Was it some kind of Foochow "ettiquette"? If you have your own, just don't accept another person's? Well, that was the social grace of that time.

"I have my own" became an interesting statement to my ears as I slowly became more aware of the social do's and don'ts of those days.

Later my grandfather gave up smoking because he was coughing too much.

Now that I cough a lot my mother would say, "You are like your grandfather."

I cough whenever I am with people who smoke.

Going back again to Lucky Strike, we kids learn a lot about cigarettes from the advertisements in Reader's Digest.

From Wikipedia : The Lucky Strike brand was introduced as chewing tobacco in the United States in 1871 by the company R.A. Patterson. The brand's founder was inspired by the era's rush for gold searching. Only some of the gold diggers (about four out of each 1000) were fortunate enough to find gold and this was often referred to as a "lucky strike".

By choosing this expression as the product's name, it implied consumers who were choosing the brand were lucky, as they were choosing a top-quality blend. Despite originally being a brand of chewing tobacco, by the early 1900s, Lucky Strike had evolved into a cigarette.

A well-circulated myth is that the name "Lucky Strike" refers to the fact that some cigarette packs contained marijuana, thus getting a "lucky strike" in receiving one of these. This, according to Snopes, is considered simply an urban legend, and not true.^[2]