A Pipe for All Seasons
-
Fred Brown - Jul 8, 2019
- 5 min read
The heart of every pipe smoker beats precipitously faster at the thought of that one go-to pipe in his or her collection.
Call it, “A Pipe for All Seasons.”
Now, the heavens aren’t going to open with a magnum opus chorus with colorful birds zipping around with pretty bunting strips.
No. But, if you smoke a pipe, you get it.
And if you are a pipe smoker, even with the smallest of collections, you know that feeling.
It’s about the one pipe that conquers all your fears, handles any tobacco leaf thrown its way, smokes like a dream every day, all day, rain, snow, plagues, frogs, locusts, whatever!
My Pipe for All Seasons is an Ashton from the early 1980s. It was given to me by the late Bill Ashton Taylor, creator of Ashton Pipes, master of the pipe universe.
Bill Taylor was so gifted a pipe maker he understood the infinitesimal artistic details of pipes. Down to the grain.
In fact, some of the sandblasts on his pipes remind of rippling waves on an ocean.
That’s not all. He knew in some mystic way how a chunk of briar burl could be worked into a smoking instrument of extraordinary quality.
It was as if he did battle with the burl itself, sandblasting, rusticating, fashioning, smoothing it into submission. Beating it into an articulate art piece.
From the fiery furnaces, Taylor’s pipes bloomed into perfection. Like a Wagnerian opera.
Okay, please forgive me. I went a little overboard there. But you get the idea. Bill Taylor created works of rare pipe art.
I have a number of Bill Taylor’s pipes, and all of them have that “something else” quality that makes them so wonderful.
Yes, all of his pipes incorporated the “oil cure” process that he learned while creating pipes for Dunhill.
And yes, his pipes consisted of the very best Mediterranean briar.
So naturally, one would think a pipe from Bill’s workshop had little choice but to turn out perfectly and deserve the title of a pipe for all seasons.
True. But of all my Bill Ashton Taylor pipes, only one, a hefty straight billiard, rises to that state of beyond the beyond.
At times when I am lonely, pressed and stressed, I reach for that Ashton billiard.
Perhaps this is a mental thing with me. Maybe it is psychological and now has infused my being with a feeling of release and fantasia if not splendor.
I just know that when I light up a Virginia or an English blend in that Ashton billiard, something goes on.
I have no idea what is happening. It just happens. I feel a blanket of relaxation. No, I am not putting any sort of “you-know-what” that rhymes with “wanna” in my pipe. Heaven forbid!
I have found that the Taylor billiard changes me and my perspective almost immediately.
Perhaps you have had similar experiences. It doesn’t necessarily take an expensive pipe for this emotion or some extrasensory encounters—just that pipe for all seasons.
As we all know in our hobby, pipes are special, like many people in your orbit.
But, mayhaps, that memorable pipe differs in one very important aspect of reality—it won’t let you down or disappoint you.
At times when I am at my lowest moments, my Ashton seems to beckon me. It is something I imagine like the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey.
The siren’s song is beguiling, of course, but isn’t leading me to some brutish end.
What’s that? You don’t hear the siren’s song?
Maybe you are not smoking the right pipe. Perhaps you haven’t found that “one” pipe that speaks to you in all seasons.
If you are still searching for that remarkable pipe, keep looking. It will turn up one day when you are either perusing new purchases for your precious collection or find it already nestled safely in that collection.
I, like you I’m sure, have many pipes that hold my heart and drive my passion.
But I reach for the Ashton when daily life closes in like a vice.
Then, as if on cue, all drops away, like the fall of a curtain at the end of a stage play.
If you haven’t found the heartbeat of the burl in your collection, maybe thinking back to our nation’s beginnings might lend some help.
Clay pipes, of course, were popular in the taverns. George Washington and other farmer-politicians, smoked, perhaps not just tobacco. Ahem.
We know of course that Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, and Gerald Ford were consummate presidential pipe smokers.
And, we should not leave out the greatest of scientists, Mr. Einstein, and legendary authors Mark Twain, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis in our pipe smoking reverie.
It is more than likely that those gents also had a special pipe that spoke to them.
If you look closely at Mr. E’s pipe, you will see that it has been smoked almost to oblivion and chewed on as if by a ferret.
Mark Twain appears in photos with a pipe, Petersons of a calabash structure mainly.
Tolkien and Lewis are very British in photos with heavily smoked billiards.
Of course, if Mark Twain wasn’t smoking a pipe, he was puffing on a cigar.
As were a few of the founding fathers, such as John Adams and James Madison. You can throw in President Ulysses S. Grant in the cigar corner, though he wasn’t a founding father as we know.
He did play a leading role in preserving the Union, however.
So, my point is that the heartbeat of the burl is in us all who take up pipe smoking.
You just have to find that right one. You will know it when it arrives.
There is a sense of well-being, an ease to life’s many tangles and wiggles.
The center holds, as it were, and the bad muses drop away into the abyss.
We are blessed to live in a time when great pipe artists are not only providing us with works of art but thriving in their endeavors.
It is the best of times in our pipe world. The worst of times is yet out there on the stormy horizon.
I for one do not worry about the threat of burdensome rules and regulations on our fair hobby.
Not with my Ashton nearby. I can weather the storm, and you will, too.
We have, you see, the burl’s heartbeat in our hands and it lives in us.
It is our pipe for all seasons.
We are the pipe and the pipe is us. We are one and that is why we will prevail in the future, no matter how many laws are passed against us.
Now is the time to find and smoke that pipe for all seasons.
 Fred Brown is a journalist who lives in Knoxville, TN. He will write this column for PipesMagazine.com monthly. He can be contacted at tennwriter@bellsouth.net. |
Written by Fred Brown
6 Responses
Smokingpipes.com Updates
48 Fresh Ropp Pipes |
9 Fresh Ashton Pipes |
132 Fresh Peterson Pipes |
12 Fresh Estate Pipes |
3 Fresh Ser Jacopo Pipes |
Recent Posts
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! Or perhaps it is that sense of satisfaction knowing and appreciating you made it to another day. With the world in a kind of rinse-and-repeat history, reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, it is perhaps a good moment to remember some of Pipedom’s philosophers whose cogent thoughts brought light to clear a path in the mists of confusion and confounding opinions. Ok. No gloom and doom. Just some down-home thoughts. Think of times in the past when history was running off the rails. It took our pipe-smoking thinkers (the mind workers of the world) to speak of better pathways to more light. Think for a moment, with a pipe in hand, these wizards of the world and word: Albert Einstein, J. R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edwin Hubble, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, and Jean-Paul Sartre. All learned and enlightened. They offered wisdom instead of storms of meaningless roads to nowhere. All while smoking their pipes! Maybe especially with the help of their pipes in the art of thinking and philosophy. Recall the words of Mr. E=MC2 when he said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” Amen and amen! Dealing with world-rattling events takes a calm and objective view of things, to the Pundit’s way of summing it up. You just don’t go messing around with quantum physics without a calm and objective approach, methinks. Or as the extraordinary physicist Robert Oppenheimer said after he and a team in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Labs developed a way to split atoms into bombs during World War II. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer referring to the development of the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It must be pointed out that Oppenheimer was more of a cigarette smoker than a pipe smoker. Nonetheless, pipes were part of his personality. Now, if you have read some of the great authors of the past and present, their pipes were always nearby. Reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a three-pipe problem at times. S. Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre require time with your pipes to reflect on the existential problems and solutions these authors provide in learned novels and other narratives. Or take Edwin Hubble and Bertrand Russell, philosophers of another world. Pipes are required for reading. The quantum lode of ideas Pundit is attempting to sort out is that our pipes are relaxing and stimulate our thoughts and creativity. Especially in these last months of the year. Many times Pundit has had that light bulb flick on while smoking my beloved pipes. And friends in Pipedom, it ain’t easy to turn on the lights in Pundit’s rock pit head. Now it’s time for a quote from a Pipe Smoker of the Past. Shelby Foote was born Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., and died June 27, 2005, in Memphis, Tenn. A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
Ah, well done. It occurs to me that I have a dozen candidates for that rôle, and it’s time to start narrowing the field. (NOT meant to be a reference to current politics.)
Mine is a Sasieni Ashford Natural. I bought it unsmoked, and kept it until a special moment in my life, which turned out to be the day my granddaughter was born. She lives far away. When I smoke that pipe, I always think of her and our next meeting. (she’s her with us this week, so that pipe stays on the rack!)
Thanks for awakening that sense of the ineffable relationship that exists between a man and his predictable, dependable pipe.
Those stellar pipes frequently have some human association with the carver or the person who gave them as a gift, it seems, at least for me. I couldn’t peg one, but of the six or eight, I am always aware that I am in the zone with them.
I have a couple or three that fit this bill. The right the wrongs of my day to day and rise with the sun of a new dawn.
My special one is or was a Kaywoodie Saxon bent. I say ‘was’ because the bottom of the bowl is getting so eroded that I save it now for only special smokes. Even the stem is better than any others, so much so that I transplant it to my next best briar with a strip of paper wrapped around the tenon to make up the difference in size for a snug fit. The stem is vulcanite – so much better than plastic – it seems immune to bite marks and is wide and comfortable, a perfect fit. I didn’t like this second briar until I did the stem swap which transformed it.