A Golden Duke Project

[Briar Lee]

Several times a year, Harry Hosterman’s wife or daughter would throw away one of Harry’s older Dr Grabow pipes and buy him a new one and he’d show it off around my father’s Grade A milk barn.

Most all I remember were Golden Duke grade, or higher sometimes.

Golden Duke Adjustomatic with patent number




I just won what looks to me to be a barely smoked Golden Duke for $16.




A lot of pipe lovers seem to under appreciate the Grabow Golden Duke series.

But there’s a reason Dr Grabow is the last high volume maker of pipes in America, and it’s because they made pipes that a man could show off around Grade A milk barns and all the children there would remember it sixty years later.

When this gets here, I’m using Murphy’s Oil Soap and 4/0 steel wool to make it better than new.

Even a Golden Duke needed the factory varnish stripped.

 

[Briarcutter]

Can't wait to see it cleaned up!

 

[Briar Lee]

Here’s a 1965 advertisement



Harry didn’t like to use the filters, although Wilda Mae and Nona Fern bought him filters.

Those pipes then at $5 would be like $50 today.

But in 1965 Harry could walk out in a timber stand and select a thousand dollar load of white oak stave bolt grade logs that would be ten thousand dollars today.

Wilda Mae and Nona Fern never wanted for anything in this world.

And Harry dodged all those falling trees, and got slick away with it.

What folks today don’t realize is just how prosperous it was a half mile South of Bug Tussle then.

My father milked 25 cows, and every two weeks I’d fetch a check for about a thousand dollars from the mail box, and take it right straight to Mama.

We lived well, you know?

 

[Briar Lee]

The Golden Duke came in yesterday. It was an Adjustomatic and somebody clenched it much more than they actually smoked it,

Murphy’s Oil Soap is miraculous!



Removed all varnish on the stummel and oxidation from the stem in one try.










If there are any fills in the briar I can’t see them.