JOHN'S PIPE AUTOBIOGRAPHY Though my father primarily smoked cigarettes, in his more relaxing moments he enjoyed smoking a pipe. I have never enjoyed nor been able to be around cigarette smoke very long without getting a headache but I have always loved the aroma of pipe tobacco. I remember many days sitting out on the patio with my father while he would be smoking one of his pipes. He had maybe six pipes. I remember one year my mom and I went together and bought him a nice pipe rack. As I recall, it was one of those round type with the humidor in the center and the pipes around it. Another time I bought him a very unusual drug store pipe. It was most likely either a Medico or a Dr. Grabow but was unlike any pipe I have seen since. It had a kind of streamlined futuristic style. But in all that time I had no interest in smoking anything. About 1974 I did buy a drug store pipe and some tobacco and tried smoking it to see whether I would like it. I tried it a few times and having no knowledge of packing the pipe, tamping, and so on it was not a pleasant experience. It was not a bad experience but I just couldn't see the attraction. I remember I tossed the pipe and the tobacco when I moved from California to Oregon. Then about 1990 a friend of mine was dating a fellow who was into photography and because my beard was semi-long back then, she got this idea of the three of us getting together and he would take some photos of me. She said with my beard it would look even more impressive if I had a pipe in my mouth. So I went out and bought a bent Dr. Grabow for the event. About 1992 I was browsing through the Johnson Smith catalog and spotted real cigars with Candela wrappers that were super huge both in ring gauge (must have been 80 or 90!) and length (about a foot). I ordered one as a joke. About a year later I was cleaning out some stuff and ran across the cigar. On a whim I decided to smoke it. The Candela wrapper made my lips tingle but otherwise I found the experience quite relaxing. In fact, I liked it so much I ordered a box of them. So I guess about 1993 was the start of what was to later become my summer smoking pattern. Because of their immense ring gauge, even the butts of those Candela cigars still had a lot of tobacco remaining in them. Being the frugal person I can be at times, I got the idea to smoke the remaining butts in the Dr. Grabow pipe I had previously purchased for the photo session! (Yes, I know I am strange!) So I would tear the butts up and each butt would be enough for a couple of full bowls in my pipe. And that was the real start of my pipe smoking. I later bought some actual pipe tobacco but found I preferred the cigar taste much better. When I ran out of those huge cigars I started buying Churchill size cigars locally (prefer Honduran with Maduro wrappers) and still cutting up the very flavorful but really tar soaked butts to smoke in my filtered pipe. I do like things with lots of flavor! For various reasons I still only smoke my pipes in the summertime. By much experimentation I have also found some very delightful pipe tobacco blends and, you'll be happy to hear, have mostly moved away from the cigar butt routine. However, I do still enjoy sticking a whole cigar in my Meerschaum pipe and smoking it that way. I call it my "cipe" (CIgar + piPE)! As a bonus, the cigars help color the Meerschaum quicker too.Though less than half my pipes have ever been smoked, the rest all have designated pipe tobaccos reserved exclusively for each one. I can't recall the first more expensive pipe but I believe it was my Big Ben Castle which I purchased from Thompson & Co., Inc. (http://www.thompsoncigar.com). I purchased that nice large freehand pipe a couple of years after starting to smoke a pipe and actually using pipe tobacco. I think I paid $50 back then which was quite a jump from the $8 to $15 Dr. Grabows I had previously limited myself to. Since then, while still enjoying my five or six Dr. Grabow pipes (particularly one Golden Duke), I have graduated to loftier pipe realms. Sincerely, John :-?