real life was stranger than TV

I had an uncle who had large tobacco farm in Horry County, and he lives in Williamsburg County. He was on faculty at Clemson in 30's for a few years, and he and my aunt shared duplex with Frank Howard and his wife when Howard was assistant coach. He also was Clemson extension agent for a time. My maternal grandfather also ran one of the largest tobacco auction houses in S.C. for a numbers of years, and me and my brothers sold boiled peanuts at the auction house during tobacco auction season. In 60's when you visited the coastal plains in tobacco country, everyone smoked down to teenagers age 14 and 15. Non-smokers were frowned upon. When the adults would be drinking cocktails at a social gathering, the smoke was thick enough to choke a horse. I am surprised I don't have lung cancer from all of the second hand smoke I took in back then!

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People smoked in front of non-smokers with no regard back

May 26, 2021, 10:51 AM

then. And, no matter the amount of cleaning that was done, it was always easy to tell if someone had smoked previously in the hotel room you checked into. It got into the carpets, drapes wallpaper, anything made of an absorptive material. Of course, this was true of homes as well.

Even in the mid 70's it was still prevalent. I remember a road trip one year while I was at Clemson. At night, we wound up at "The Whipping Post" nightclub, in Augusta. The cigarette smoke was so thick, it actually made a separate sheet cloud that hung down from ceiling level about 4 feet. It was wintertime, and the winter coat I wore that night woke me up the next morning from the smoke smell from all the way across the hotel room in the closet.

Being a nonsmoker back then was tough. Even in industry, I was the only supervision in an office that was shared by four people who didn't smoke. Kept a sore throat almost constantly from it. Nobody cared about secondhand smoke back then.