Growing Up in a Smoking Household

"One of my other earliest memories of my mother is her cough."

I was born in 1948, and as a child in the 1950's, my culture relentlessly promulgated smoking too. You could smoke anywhere, even in a hospital room - hell, even doctors and nurses smoked! You could smoke in restaurants, stores, shopping centers, bus stations, train stations, airports (and inside the buses, trains and airplanes themselves). It was difficult to find a nonsmoking section, which, if it existed at all, was a few tables or chairs without ashtrays where nobody sat.

In my culture and my generation, there existed a powerful influence right in our living rooms which even my parents generation didn't have. Yes, everyone had a television and the selling of cigarettes (and, as we later began to find out, the knowing and relentless process of creating customers for those cigarettes by creating addicts) was a huge part of television broadcasting in those days. Tobacco companies sponsored entire programs which were introduced by dancing girls dressed as packs of their cigarettes, with only their legs showing (again, sex appeal and cigarettes, closely associated). The incessant slogans and jingles beat upon our brains. From:

"Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." all the way through "Have a Lark, have a Lark have a Lark today! to "You've come a long way, baby!" and "a silly millimeter longer".

Music, repetition, rhyme and humor - things the subconscious mind, especially the mind of a child (a fact known and used by the producers of Sesame Street when they began to teach children letters and numbers in the same way those children learned the names of cereals and cigarettes) seizes upon and remembers, were being used deliberately to create associations in the minds of people which would later lead to those people becoming consumers of a product which was both murderously addictive and deadly … a fact which its producers knew very early on and which was assiduously kept from the public.

Cigarette smoking was carefully associated by those same marketers with leisure, fun, relaxation, happiness – the good life to which every American aspired and felt entitled. Smoking a cigarette was perceived as a "reward" for everything from completing a difficult task to reaching a milestone in one's life. And this image was diligently and tirelessly cultivated by the tobacco companies, who, at the same time, were lobbying furiously to keep the other images that were beginning to surface as the first consumers of cigarettes began to fall ill and die from them - the ones of suffering and disease and death – out of the eyes and mind of the public.

The careful, insipid wording of the very first Surgeon General's warning to appear (in tiny, tiny print) on packs of cigarettes and in cigarette advertising in the mid 60's (and the fact that such a warning appeared only after a long and bitterly contested battle, long after the harm smoking could do and had done was already known) attests to those companies' sucess.

"Caution:" it read quietly, "Cigarette smoke may (emphasis mine) be hazardous to your health."

Yeah, right; it "may" be!

That "hazard" had been known from the beginning. One of my other earliest memories of my mother is her cough. It was a small cough in my childhood - a little polite "a-hem" - not the racking, rattling, agonizing sound she made later in the throes of the COPD which eventually claimed her life - but it was there; it was always present. She knew it and so did we. But how can you blame my mother (or us) for not making the connection? How can you blame my parents (or their children) for not making that connection (or the connection between a house filled with smoke and the frequent bouts of bronchitis and chest colds we children had) when everything in our atmosphere and our culture was deliberately designed to prevent anyone from making that connection?

I don't blame them, or anyone else who has become bound by the addiction. For them I feel only pity - not that they were "weak" or "wrong" - but pity for the fact that they fell into that trap which was made for them and all of my anger and blame and rage is for the companies and marketers that deliberately caused them to buy their own death in daily doses. My parents had no idea that they were blowing death and addiction in their own children's faces every day.

Thank the gods I was nauseated by cigarette smoke during my pregnancy. I didn't smoke then and didn't resume until my daughter was nearly two years old.