A Really Good Four Dollar Cigar

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Briar Lee

Lifer
Sep 4, 2021
4,837
13,910
Humansville Missouri
Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, quipped his way to immortality in 1913 when a long winded Kansas Senator was bloviating on and on about all the many things America needed, and Riley ruminated:

What this country needs is a really good five cent cigar


A century has passed and a nickel in 1913 was worth about a dollar fifty today. But while Riley received almost countless thousands of manufacturer’s samples of nickel cigars (which would be buck fifty cigars today) a few months later he was quoted as saying:

“The country’s greatest need still exists”

Even in 1913, really good cigars were fifteen cents, or maybe two for a quarter.

In addition to never missing one payment on my pipe habit, I occasionally like a really good cigar, above the Dutch Masters grade, especially at my farm.

I’ve been buying long filler, hand rolled cellophane wrapped bundles of cigars now for a nearly half a century. Back then really good ones were a dollar a stick. But then a Dutch Masters was still a nickel and Half and Half a quarter a pouch. A dollar cigar in 1977 should be five dollars today, according to the inflation calculator.

On my way to the farm, I stopped by a Smoker Friendly outlet in Versailles Missouri, and bought this bundle of really good four dollar cigars.

Smoker Friendly Nicaraguan Gold White Label Churchill 50 x 6 1/2

DB132756-8C49-45F8-B7E5-1303F849C435.jpeg

It has a real paper and foil band.

1F321BD2-B389-45EA-8487-BC8CFF3F4350.jpeg

The cigar has that good, oily, glistening sheen only righteous hand rolled cigars have, and it’s well made and burns evenly.



01DC9EFF-392F-479E-98A9-5939A0AFD2B4.jpeg

These are bold, spicy, and delicious Nicaraguan cigars, the kind you can pass around to company that visit.

They are long filler, zig zag constructed, really good cigars.
 
F

fMf Piper

Guest
Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, quipped his way to immortality in 1913 when a long winded Kansas Senator was bloviating on and on about all the many things America needed, and Riley ruminated:

What this country needs is a really good five cent cigar


A century has passed and a nickel in 1913 was worth about a dollar fifty today. But while Riley received almost countless thousands of manufacturer’s samples of nickel cigars (which would be buck fifty cigars today) a few months later he was quoted as saying:

“The country’s greatest need still exists”

Even in 1913, really good cigars were fifteen cents, or maybe two for a quarter.

In addition to never missing one payment on my pipe habit, I occasionally like a really good cigar, above the Dutch Masters grade, especially at my farm.

I’ve been buying long filler, hand rolled cellophane wrapped bundles of cigars now for a nearly half a century. Back then really good ones were a dollar a stick. But then a Dutch Masters was still a nickel and Half and Half a quarter a pouch. A dollar cigar in 1977 should be five dollars today, according to the inflation calculator.

On my way to the farm, I stopped by a Smoker Friendly outlet in Versailles Missouri, and bought this bundle of really good four dollar cigars.

Smoker Friendly Nicaraguan Gold White Label Churchill 50 x 6 1/2

View attachment 212102

It has a real paper and foil band.

View attachment 212104

The cigar has that good, oily, glistening sheen only righteous hand rolled cigars have, and it’s well made and burns evenly.



View attachment 212105

These are bold, spicy, and delicious Nicaraguan cigars, the kind you can pass around to company that visit.

They are long filler, zig zag constructed, really good cigars.
Those sound tasty, and right up my alley for putzing around the farm.

Smoker Friendly must be very different in Missouri than here in Kentucky. After reading a couple of your reviews of SF pipe tobacco and cigars, I decided to visit a couple of the shops here, and let's just say they seem worlds apart from your stores. They cater almost exclusively to cigarette smokes with an exceptionally limited cigar selection, and almost non-existent pipe tobacco selection. So disappointed as I love a good value smoke as much as the next guy. If I am ever in Missouri, I will certainly have to visit a SF store to experience the difference.
 

Briar Lee

Lifer
Sep 4, 2021
4,837
13,910
Humansville Missouri
In 1972 every little restaurant and gas station in the Ozarks sold cigars. Canadian Club and King Edward were a nickel, Muriel and White Owl were a dime, and as I remember it sometimes they offered El Producto for fifteen cents.

Any brand of cigarettes was forty cents.

And they offered your choice of Prince Albert, Velvet or Half and Half for a quarter. OCB papers were a nickel little boxes of Diamond Strike Anywhere matches were by then two or three for a nickel.

The first hand rolled, high quality long filler cigars I ever saw displayed for sale were at a slot in the wall tobacco shop on 12th street in downtown Kansas City on an FFA trip in 1973, when I was 15. The big ones were a dollar, Coronas were about 75 cents.

I bought a couple of dollar cigars, and a package of Sherman’s and Player’s, and that night at the Muehlebach Hotel (where the Presidents stayed) I savored my first really good cigar, looking out the window at sin, depravity and vice below I’d only heard about before.


I got up really early to go back to the shop to buy a $12.50 cellophane wrapped bundle of 25 good cigars to smuggle home.

Somewhere in that milk barn there’s a box with the bands, and empty boxes of Sherman’s and Player’s, and an empty package of Amphora, and other mementoes of my first taste of the big city.

9783CE29-0B59-455F-A2B8-EFB6E582C2B1.jpeg

Fifty cent cigars in 1973, would be about $3.40 today.

My four dollar cigars today are bigger, than bundle cigars were then.

It’s a lot easier to buy them today.:)
 

mso489

Lifer
Feb 21, 2013
41,210
60,459
Not that they're really good, but whatever happened to those machine made King Edward cigars, very mild but smokeable. I've seen them on sale online, but they are never in stock. Likewise, HavaTampas, with the little wooden mouthpiece, seemed to have disappeared. I used to smoke those in the student union at a study table with a little lamp, a pretty nice smoking stall with ashtray provided, in Columbia, Missouri.
 
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Briar Lee

Lifer
Sep 4, 2021
4,837
13,910
Humansville Missouri
Not that they're really good, but whatever happened to those machine made King Edward cigars, very mild but smokeable. I've seen them on sale online, but they are never in stock. Likewise, HavaTampas, with the little wooden mouthpiece, seemed to have disappeared. I used to smoke those in the student union at a study table with a little lamp, a pretty nice smoking stall with ashtray provided, in Columbia, Missouri.

About 1978 the student union at University of Missouri-Kansas City got in some of The Pipe phenolic smoking pipes.

3D4F1835-6B79-437B-8936-C619087C0123.jpeg

I paid about $8 for mine. Mine was blue, and I remember it wasn’t difficult to build a cake “the thickness of a dime” like Harry Hosterman advised me.

It’s still in the milk barn someplace in the original box with all the papers. There was something about highly advanced phenolics utilized in the space program being used to maximize my smoking pleasure.

All in all, I preferred my E A Carey pipes.

Phenolic is fancy word for plastic.

95A1D53F-91F0-4DB5-B5DA-888B2A48A0F2.jpeg
 
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Zamora

Can't Leave
Mar 15, 2023
378
987
Olympia, Washington
I'll have to check those out. I've had Factory Smokes and Quorums, didn't care for either, thankfully my B&M has them as singles so I wasn't stuck with a bundle. I remember reading either Coolidge or Hoover smoked 25 cent cigars, which was of course deemed to be incredibly decadent. On the original iteration of the Addams Family Gomez was stated to spend $1000 a month of cigars, I have no idea how much cigars went for on average in the 60s but even today that's a lot of cigars. I'll never forget on r/cigars I saw a New Zealander talking about how he was new to cigars and so far had only smoked "cheap ones, around thirty dollars."
 
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Briar Lee

Lifer
Sep 4, 2021
4,837
13,910
Humansville Missouri
That milk barn holds a treasure trove memories.
I have the original blueprints of it from 1958.

Much like Cuban cigars, something about the minerals in the soil in the Ozark Foothillls produced grass that gave milk a good flavor.

And there were lots of old time Scottish immigrant families like mine who had milked cows and sold cream and butter for generations.

(It’s no coincidence the engineer on the starship Enterprise was named Scottie).:)

It exceeds the Grade A “school lunch” whole milk standards of 1958 by a large margin.

My father Bruce Alvin was 5’10”.

Every rope, lever, the height of the stanchions, doors, windows and everything was custom built for him.

And no surgeon’s operating room was cleaner.

Odd, I really didn’t like raw milk from the tank.

But homogenized, pasteurized and chilled it was the best milk on this earth.