Cigar Smoking Kid Grows Up

A chain smoker since infancy, once sickly Texan is today a hardy, six-foot-three airman

Ebony Magazine
February 1970

One night 18 years ago Mrs. Mary Louise Harris became hysterical. Her fifth child, Charles, was having another seizure. His body had stiffened, he had lost his breath and passed out. Mrs. Harris’ husband was at his warehouse overseer’s job. The doctor had said that Charles might die. Distraught, Mrs. Harris wrapped the child in a blanket and was out in the chilly Texas night, beginning the 12-mile trek toward the doctor’s house in Forney. When her nine-year old son caught up to her and yelled at her to come back to the house, she carried the infant back inside and began the familiar ritual of shifting him from arm to arm, jarring life’s breath into his lungs.

It was a year later that Ebony heard about Charles, who by then was a healthy-looking, robust child. Finding one of his “paw’s” cigars one day, the infant had eaten it and it had abated his symptoms. His mother, guessing that this might be the answer the doctor had not been able to find, had kept giving the boy cigars to eat, gradually his “fits” became less frequent. “I knew you could worm a puppy with tobacco,” says Mrs. Harris, “and nothing else had been able to help.”

From eating cigars to smoking them was a short step, and soon Charles was chain smoking 10 a day. “We had the cafe then and could afford it,” jokes Mrs. Harris. By age seven his illness was completely gone, but Charles could still obtain cigars whenever he wanted by complaining that “I’m getting a spell” and pretending he was going to faint. “He was spoiled rotten as cotton,” says his mother. “They all would give him whatever he wanted, but now they blame me.” When he started school the teachers continued to let him smoke, but away from the other children. Eventually his interest in playing with the other children stopped him from smoking in school, but each day when he got home Charles had to have his “paw.”

When Charles was 11 something new was added. He was driving his brother-in-law’s Corvette along a service road one day while trying out the man’s pipe. “A girl said I was looking good with that pipe in my mouth, and that really got me interested in pipe smoking.” Since then he has owned 350 pipes. Five he has given to girl friends as souvenirs.

In his first two months at Sheppard Air Force Base last year, Charles convinced 15 of the 35 men in his barracks to switch from cigarette smoking to pipes. “I like to see a man enjoying a pipe,” he says. “I hate cigarette smoking. All it does is make you sick and look stupid.”

“I have some ideas for advertisements for pipes and cigars,” he says. “When I get out of the Air Force, I’m going back to school in advertising. That’s where the money is. I hope to open up a pipe store to help people find out how good pipe smoking is.”

Note: I spoke with his sister Ann in 2011 who said that Charles gave up smoking in the 1980’s. Charles came from good stock, his mother Mary just passed away at the youthful age of 104 in March 2011. Hopefully all that smoking didn’t do him too much damage.

See the original article here.