Very nice! pappy', my late wife grew up in Eastern N.C. and had an extended family that tended toward large gatherings. They were comfortably well-off for the most part, but as far as I can remember, no one in the family, in any generation, smoked a pipe, but there were certainly cigarette smokers in the group. It just wasn't a cultural thing. Perhaps in the western part of the state, which is a decidedly different culture, pipes may have had some foothold. I haven't shopped pipes there. That's an interesting analysis about the economy and pipe smoking. My sense is that pipes were generally available at working-man prices, so it was more an image thing. People spent more time outdoors, for work and recreation, so maybe pipe smoking wasn't so popular. Even in the coastal communities, where my mother-in-law's people were from, there wasn't much of a pipe culture that I saw. The old salts with their pipes seems to have been more of a New England thing. There are probably pockets somewhere in the region, but I haven't come across them, and they certainly haven't left a trail of pipes! Not antique nor junktique.
