When you see a Bertram’s pipe it could have been made in 1900 or 1977.
There were three generations of old Germans there, and by the forties they had sold FDR his cigarrete holder and Winston Churchill bought Havanas there for a dollar each and Joseph Stalin got shipped tobacco that was a special Bertram’s blend, likely $2.50 a pound.
The same store would have sold the Watergate conspirators pipes and cigars and Fanny Foxe whatever Wilbur Mills smoked.
The only Bertram catalog I know of is 1950.
Bertram smoking pipes catalog
archive.org
The top special order straight grains in 1950 cost $10 to $25. Machine made pipes cost $1.50 to $10. All were ancient, oil cured, aged Algerian but cheaper and less ancient pipes were stained and had fills.
By the 1970s there had been a 100% inflaton and each year there was about 10% inflation and the choice Algerian briar specified was all two decades old—then. Even Dunhill gave up making pipes of Algerian briar in 1968, not Bertram’s.
There are no two number grades listed in the 1950 catalog.
My guess is after Korean War price controls were lifted, that Bertram’s matched London Best prices so Fanny Foxe would have bought Wilbur Mills a Bertram’s instead.
It would have meant death charging too little, as well as charging too much, at the most famous smoke shop in the United States, if not the entire world.
Old men have loved the best and oldest pipes and the prettiest and youngest women for a long time, and neither come cheap.
Fanny Foxe- $15,000 a week “dancer”
Wilbur Mills- Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
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After two public incidents with a
strippernamed
Fanne Foxe, Mills stepped down as Chair of the Ways and Means and checked into the Palm Beach Institute for Alcoholism for three months and he declined to seek re-election in 1976, even though he had received more than 59% of the vote for re-election after the first incident. After leaving office, he returned to the practice of law and helped establish a center for the treatment of alcoholism, the Wilbur D. Mills Center for Alcoholism and Drug Treatment Center, while supporting similar centers around the country in their fundraising efforts.
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My mother used Wilbur Mills as an example of how booze could ruin a man’s life and reputation and I should never take that first sip.
He’s buried with his wife and no proof exists she killed him.
US Congressman. He was educated in the public schools of Kensett and Searcy, Arkansas before graduating as salutatorian from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. He studied constitutional law at Harvard University under future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfruter. He was admitted to the bar...
www.findagrave.com
