Another Lee Star Grade for the Stash

[Briar Lee]

These days it seems more difficult to win genuine Lee Star Grade pipes for my self imposed price guideline of $20-30. This little billiard came in at a delivered price of $25 and I had to re-clock the stem (no trouble at all) and I can faintly make out the ghosts of where three stamped stars were when the pipe left the New York City factory.

I’ll clean this up some more when my workday is done, but right now a bowl of Smoker’s Pride Cherry Cavendish smolders in the oil cured briar, and my it’s tasty.

Few Lee Star Grades were large size pipes, most are mediums, yet there are quite a few of this smaller size that were bought back in the day.

I own over sixty Lee Star Grade pipes.

From early morning until evening they are kept full of aromatic tobaccos in my car and office. I might fill and light a half dozen different Lees a day.

A high grade pre war Kaywoodie is indisputably a better pipe than a Lee.

But after 1946 Lee made the finest factory regular production pipes on earth.

For as little as $25 you can have a smokable example.

 

[sandollars]

Congratulations on your new acquisition. Smoke it in good health!

 

[FurCoat]

Good looking pipes. Congrats

 

[mso489]

I confess I'd never heard of Lee pipes until you posted about them on here. They look like sturdy work horse pipes, and you pick them up at good prices. I like my various U.S. factory pipes a lot.

 

[huntertrw]

Briar Lee:

I agree with your positive appraisal of Pipes by Lee. Years ago a beautifully-grained Lee Three-Star Limited Edition estate briar bulldog found and adopted me. It is a favorite, and just delivered an enjoyable bowl of vintage Ogden's of Liverpool Gold Block. Indeed, this pipe and that tobacco make a delightful pairing.

 

[MacMarty89]

Never heard of that brand before I read about it here. They look interesting, but I would just never buy pre-smoked pipes myself.

 

[telescopes]

I own a few myself. They are indeed a moderately goid smoking pipe. Dependably good is what comes to my mind.

 

[Briar Lee]

What features make any briar pipe a luxury item and not something made just to sell at a low price?

First and foremost it must be made of well grained, cured and preferably aged briar. Every 7 and 5 pointed inlaid star Lee and all 3 star or better grade stamped star era Lee pipes featured excellent briar. The more stars the better, but Lee only made luxury grade pipes, selling for five, ten, fifteen and twenty five dollars when a dollar bought a decent pipe off the drug store display.

Then it must have a top grade vulcanite stem. All Lee production used the best vulcanite.

The real art of making pipes comes in the final carving and polishing. All Lee pipes are well carved and finished. None feel cheap, and none were cheapies.


I own a few pipes that appear made entirely by machines, but I know they weren’t. All briar pipes involve some amount skilled labor to produce. There are no badly made Lees but the first 7 and 5 gold inlaid star production examples were made by top notch craftsmen. Even the last ones were well made, just not as fancy as the early ones.

Why Lee pipes are undervalued in the market, I think is because of these reasons:

1. Lee didn’t spend a fortune advertising. The brand recognition we have for famous brand pipes isn’t there in our minds.

2. Lee pipes have metal stingers and metal fittings to join stummel and stem. So do Kaywoodies, only Lees are technically better. Dunhills and other luxury brands, didn’t have stingers.

3. I doubt any Lee pipes have been made for fifty years, and there weren’t millions upon millions made during the height of production. The Lee brand, never very famous, is long dead and buried.

But if you ever own a good Lee pipe, it ruins you for lesser pipes.

 

[huntertrw]

...but I would just never buy pre-smoked pipes myself.

I once felt the same way until I read (and pondered) what author Richard Carleton Hacker had to say on the subject in his book titled Pipesmoking - A 21st Century Guide: "Admittedly, there is something unsettling about smoking a pipe that someone else once owned, but in reality, it is no different than eating with silverware at a restaurant. We know we are not the first to use that knife and fork, but it doesn't concern us because they have been cleaned and sterilized. It is the same concept with estate pipes." He also writes, "...these previously-smoked pipes have been sterilized inside with boiling alcohol, cleaned and polished outside, with special care being taken not to change the original finish or any of the stamped nomenclature, all of which affects the pipe's value."

 

[Briar Lee]

Today I won a $20 (delivered) stamped star Three Star small apple.



Stamped star pipes seem to have equal briar quality as earlier (and more desirable inlaid gold star 7 and 5 points.

Don’t worry about a missing stinger. One fits all, so if you like stingers you can rob one from any Lee, Pipe Maker, or Briarlee.

If it’s more than $30 it should be a large, 7 or 5 point gold inlaid star era pipe.


Some tips for buying a Lee:

You want to see the bit ever so slightly to the left. Lees are adjustable, but decades of tars might cement the fitment to where it’s very difficult to reclock the stem.

You want clear, deep, distinct lettering.

 

[Peter Turbo]

You love to see it.

 

[anotherbob]

What features make any briar pipe a luxury item and not something made just to sell at a low price?

First and foremost it must be made of well grained, cured and preferably aged briar. Every 7 and 5 pointed inlaid star Lee and all 3 star or better grade stamped star era Lee pipes featured excellent briar. The more stars the better, but Lee only made luxury grade pipes, selling for five, ten, fifteen and twenty five dollars when a dollar bought a decent pipe off the drug store display.

Then it must have a top grade vulcanite stem. All Lee production used the best vulcanite.

The real art of making pipes comes in the final carving and polishing. All Lee pipes are well carved and finished. None feel cheap, and none were cheapies.


I own a few pipes that appear made entirely by machines, but I know they weren’t. All briar pipes involve some amount skilled labor to produce. There are no badly made Lees but the first 7 and 5 gold inlaid star production examples were made by top notch craftsmen. Even the last ones were well made, just not as fancy as the early ones.

Why Lee pipes are undervalued in the market, I think is because of these reasons:

1. Lee didn’t spend a fortune advertising. The brand recognition we have for famous brand pipes isn’t there in our minds.

2. Lee pipes have metal stingers and metal fittings to join stummel and stem. So do Kaywoodies, only Lees are technically better. Dunhills and other luxury brands, didn’t have stingers.

3. I doubt any Lee pipes have been made for fifty years, and there weren’t millions upon millions made during the height of production. The Lee brand, never very famous, is long dead and buried.

But if you ever own a good Lee pipe, it ruins you for lesser pipes.

have you considered getting into lawyering i feel like you could explain why i had to kill that jerk and how it being a "crime" is a simple oversight. I often imagine you made a contest with old scratch that you'd get a golden fiddle if you can sell a million lefs

 

[Briar Lee]

It might be said with justice a Lee is a poor boy’s Kaywoodie, and a rich man’s Grabow.

Sixty and seventy some odd years ago there was money to be made manufacturing pipes. Every pipe maker used (and still does) all the efficient labor savoring machines possible, and the chief difference between factory pipes, was marketing.

My Five Star Lee sold for 25 times the price of a cheap drugstore dollar pipe and five times what a Two Star Lee or Kaywoodie Super Grain brought. The top $25 Lee Five Star was the highest priced regularly cataloged production pipe on earth.

Poor folks haven’t ever touched most Lees, and wealthy men preferred Kaywoodies.

If a Lee was a car, it would be a Pakard, minus the collector appeal.

You can ask the man who owns one.

 

[PipeIT]

Congrats! ????

And ever since you’ve been Ruminating over Lees, I’ve been looking for one... LOL ?

 

[didimauw]

I still enjoy reading your posts. Keep em coming. Makes me want one. But I don't smoke dead men's pipes. But they are beautiful.

 

[Briar Lee]

I still enjoy reading your posts. Keep em coming. Makes me want one. But I don't smoke dead men's pipes. But they are beautiful.

Of all the more common old American factory pipe brands, I think it’s easier to find a brand new, old stock Lee than any other. I know I’ve bought maybe close to a dozen still in the box, brand new, unsmoked.

So you might not object to one of those.

Lee apparently was mail order only, and advertising is scarce compared with other brands.

When Lord (soon to be Baron) Inverchapel bought two $15 high end English pipes in 1946 it made the trade papers. Kaywoodie Drinkless pipes, a luxury item, were still $3.50. Why are all those inlaid gold star Three and even Five Star grade Lees still in drawers, unsmoked?

One solution might be the pipes were Christmas gifts. But wouldn’t Dad be obliged to smoke it at least once?

I think there’s another answer.

The late 1940s was THE most prosperous four years in American history. Like today Americans bought every car Detroit could make. They built new homes, and bought everything they couldn’t during the Depression and WW2.

Buyers bought Lee pipes, just because they were available.

In another 75 years, there will be estate sales where luxury goods bought today, will still be new in boxes.

 

[PipeIT]

Oooh I’d love to find a NOS Lee, I’ve personally never found any online... hmm ?

 

[didimauw]

Certainly looks like they made their pipes with pride!

 

[Briar Lee]

We say something is the Cadillac of it’s kind today, but in 1946 the top American luxury car, by reputation was a Packard.

Packard made over 50,000 Merlin engines that powered P-51 Mustangs and PT boats during the war.

What we can’t really imagine is how scared people were, that when 16 million boys came home, and all those hundreds of billions of dollars of war orders ended, that the country would relapse back into another Depression.

But the exact opposite happened to another Depression. America went wild on a buying spree. Prosperity, along with demand driven inflation, roared.

I’ve heard my father, and others of his generation, tell how in the late 1940s a farmer could load enough cows in the back of a brand new truck to pay for it.

In 1947 he married my mother and they paid cash for a brand new $1,800 home.

The next year they bought 80 acres for $1,800, I still own today.

That same year of 1948 they bought two brand new Ford 8-N tractors.

In late 1949 they bought a brand new 1950 Ford car.

In 1953 they bought a brand new Ford truck.

In 1954 they built a brand new $5,000 home I still rent out today.

In 1954 they traded in the 1950 Ford for a new 1955.

In 1958 they built a brand new Grade A milk barn, I still use for storage.

And, they paid cash, for all those things except the milk barn, which had a 20 year low interest FMHA loan, payments $17.50 a month.

It’s the same nation, the same basic economic system, and people today are far more prosperous to look at how they live, than then.

But we live as well as we do today on borrowed money, and they paid cash.

Packard’s huge mistake was to sell lower priced Packards when they could have sold every Senior Packard they could have made for years and years.

My father’s prosperity was fueled by a school milk program that put a cold half pint of milk beside the dinner plate of every schoolchild in America.

As I remember the price supports were $5 per hundred pounds of milk. To have the same purchasing power that should be $50 per hundred today.

An old friend of my father’s who is still milking told me a couple of weeks ago the support price is very high now, $22. Usually it’s around $14-15.

If my father had been a pipe smoker, my mother would have bought him $10 Lee pipes for Christmas and birthdays and so would his mother.

They might have even bought him the $25 Five Star grade.

A $10 Lee pipe then, would be the equivalent of a $100 to $150 pipe today.

Pricey, but not something a prosperous family could not afford.