Thanks for the replies! I'd love to see that example with the "slits". I don't remember getting any cradles. I have some of the walnut pipe rests, but was looking more along the lines of a display rack. Maybe the shelf idea will serve as well.
Let me share a story...
It was 1977, my freshman year in college (Northwest Missouri State, Maryville Mo.). My roommate and I decided we were going to try pipe smoking. Both my grandfathers smoked, so I already was hooked on the idea. It would also fit in nicely with our new image as intellectuals. We were 18 years old.
We purchased some Prince Albert and a couple of Dr. Grabows at the local Kmart and started our learning curve. We didn't have the interwebs in those days...we had to learn it on the streets. hehehe...
By the end of our freshman year, we were both getting pretty darn good at it, at least I was, and it was something I enjoyed. My mother was rabidly anti-pipe. Growing up in a household with a pipe smoker had turned her completely against the idea of ever having another smoker in the house. With this in mind...into a box went my pipe to wait until the beginning of the next semester that fall.
During the summer I went for a visit to my roommate's home. He had been secretly smoking his pipe as well. He announced that we needed "real" pipes and we would be going to Kansas City to the Tinderbox located in the Crown Center shopping mall.
I'm from rural Iowa. I had never been in a mall before and
never to a tobacco store. I was pumped!! We made the trip and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Rows to tobbacco in jars, walls full of pipes, boxes of cigars, and not nearly the amount of knick knack stuff that shops have in their inventory these days. I browsed the pipes until I saw one that I thought was simply gorgeous!! Its the middle pipe in the pictures above, a Golden Walnut. I asked to see it and the gentleman behind the counter took it down and handed it to me. As soon as I held it I knew it was something special..the way it fit my hand, the way my thumb wrapped around the bowl, the beautiful wood grain, the nonsymmetrical shape, it had it all. This pipe was made for me!!
I turned it over, looked at the price tag, and immediately got a cold hard knot in my stomach. 75$ I had brought $30 spending money. Remember, this is the 1970s, money went further in those days. I was crushed, but my lust was strong. Dad had loaned me $100 for gas and I was supposed to invite my hosts to a resturant meal somewhere. I briefly debated the merits of taking my roommate's parents out for a dinner, or owning this pipe. I took two fifty dollar bills out of my wallet and paid for the pipe.
I returned home, hide the pipe away in my school things...enjoying it would have to wait a couple of months, and prayed my father would not bring up the missing meal. He only asked if there was any change left over, to which I replied..."not much" and he said "keep it".
30 years later, I think of it ever time I smoke this pipe.
Big freehands fell out of style within 10 years or so. Holm died. Things change. However, my love for the 1970s style freehand pipes has never slackened. I purchased a few of the other styles, Canadians, Bulldogs, etc., but they never seemed to have the class of these old pipes.
I've got a bunch of 'em. I've never really counted them...somewhere between 25-30 likely. I would like to display them properly, since at fifty years of age, I'm no longer hiding them from my mom.
