Title changed. This thread was started in response to a request by the OP, so I did it to make sure copy and paste would work on a large file.
TheIronMonkey
Part of the Furniture Now
Saturday at 11:28 PMMy father was a package designer. In the 1950s, he handled a lot of overflow work and did designs for a big advertising executive named Frank Gianninoto. He worked on the package for Marlboro cigarettes when Gianninoto was rebranding it from a women's brand into the manly brand we know today with the red chevron. My father worked on holiday packages for KOOL and Viceroy in the '60s (and designed annual reports for Philip Morris through the early '70s). He worked in an office, but, he also had a studio set up in the basement at home.
He worked on the candy wrappers in the '60s for Three Musketeers and Milky Way (see the hand painted dummy for that below and the hand painted pasta box) and a whole bunch of other fairly iconic designs.
In the '70s he worked on Swanson TV dinners. He swore we'd never eat such terrible food and was horrified when he found out years later that my mother fed us nothing but Swanson TV dinners for a year and a half when he was away spending time with one of my brothers in another state.
Around 1967, he worked on Four Roses packaging (when I believe Seagram's might've owned it). Those of you into higher end bourbon will remember when Four Roses did the Al Young 50th Anniversary Small Batch release, they inverted the bottom heavy bottle design to look like this 1967 one my dad worked on:
My dad chain smoked Pall Mall cigarettes, but, he also smoked a pipe. I remember him smoking Cherry Borkum Riff, but, when I picture the big round tin he had, it was black and white—so, I'm thinking he must've been smoking the Bourbon Whiskey version. I loved the smell of his pipe. In the early '70s he smoked a Barling Challenger. I can still picture the deep, dark, blue box with condensed, white, sans serif lettering it came in. My dad's pipes are in storage. I'm hoping to retrieve them sooner than later and smoke them. Or at least display them. I recently picked up a pouch of the Borkum Riff Bourbon Whiskey tobacco and will smoke it to rekindle the memories of my father smoking it.
In the mid-to-late-Eighties, when I was playing competitive darts in leagues and tournaments, there was a guy at my local team bar in Manhattan, the Kettle of Fish, named Bob Teague. Bob was always doing work around the bar and smoked a pipe. He made a dart cabinet for me, which I still have. I loved the smell of his pipe, too. Unfortunately, Bob died from throat cancer.
In the early '90s I got into cigars big time. I was subscribing to Cigar Aficionado, Marvin Shanken's Cigar Insider Newsletter, buying any cigar magazine I could find. I was buying cigars by the box and smoking at least one a day. I picked up a Dr. Grabow pipe to add a little variety to the mix and smoke a pipe instead of a cigar on occasion. When my father died from lung cancer in 2002, I cut back on smoking quite a bit.
In 2018 and 2019 I attended CIGARfest with Susan and had a great time and got back into cigars. I received some freebie Missouri Meerschaum pipes in the bundles each year. I work on a magazine with a friend and he got into cigars and that reinvigorated my interest as well. Sharing a hobby with a friend can be great fun. My interest in pipes got rekindled in 2020, especially when it got too cold to smoke outside. Susan can tolerate my pipes indoors, but, the cigars, not so much.
I guess because my dad was a package designer, it's why I enjoy collecting some pipes in their original packaging. My appreciation for the design as a whole comes from seeing my father work on so many cool things growing up. And the smell of his pipe probably has much to do with it, too. I miss him very much.
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