Ruminations on a Battered Lee

[Briar Lee]

Likely because of clever pricing and marketing, the first owners of Lee Star Grade pipes tended to baby their new bauble.

After all, even Howard Hughes could not buy a more expensive regular production pipe than a $25 Lee Five Star. The lucky owner might have only spent $10 for his Three Star, but every Lee Star Grade was a Thorsten Veblen approved status symbol.

So among all the new, as new, or lightly smoked Lees I have in my stash, there’s this one pitiful condition large billiard that not even a ghost of a star remains on the stem. The joint is so worn between stem and shank I have to shim it with pipe joint tape and aluminum foil. It’s burned, sanded, and battered.

I sit and wonder who smoked this Lee nearly, but not quite, to death.

The pipe isn’t sour. He had to clean it regularly. And while it’s been sanded hard on the stem and around the bowl, there’s still plenty of wall thickness, and he even avoided sanding off the lettering.

The pipe came ghosted with Latakia rich English tobacco, so that’s what I smoke in it, outdoors where nobody complains of the catfish bait smell, or asks me how many stars my Lee has.

I hope the original owner was a sailor, or other outdoorsman.

At this great distance across the void of time, it’s hard to tell.

So I just turn on some Moon Mullican, and puff my battered Lee to the same music he might have enjoyed then.

 

[brian64]

The lucky owner might have only spent $10 for his Three Star, but every Lee Star Grade was a Thorsten Veblen approved status symbol.

Well, at least while smoking that one you're not likely to be accused of conspicuous consumption.

 

[jpmcwjr]

I guess you can't keep a good pipe down! Well saved!

It looks like the previous guy held his flame in the front, below the rim a lot...

 

[didimauw]

Yeah those pipes you gotta think are good smokers. The cracked, beat and worn. Especially a Lee. If someone can afford a Lee, they can afford another. So the fact that he kept smoking this poor thing means he must have been attached to it. Or he spent his whole life savings on this pipe and couldn't afford another at that point.

 

[Briar Lee]

What little Lee advertisements that survive don’t mention servicing and repairing the pipes, like Kaywoodie did,

A Lee was the top priced production pipe on earth in the late forties and the fifties, so perhaps Lee didn’t think mentioning service or repairs would help his customers “reach for the stars, symbol of the world’s finest pipe”.

But surely Lee did service and repair what he sold. In that era he was expected to.

I’ve pondered what Lee’s highest cost was, and I’m convinced it was hand inlaying those gorgeously perfect 7 and later 5 pointed gold stars, like a piece of jewelry, using jeweler’s gold. Those were the first to go when Lee sold the company, replaced by stamped stars filled with engraver’s gilding that soon falls out,,,,but it leaves the stamped stars behind.

This is the only Lee I own that has zero trace of ever having any stars. And the stem is in better condition than the stummel, by a ways.

I can’t prove it, but the most likely explanation was that the original owner had the Lee factory replace the stem.

Kaywoodie replaced the stummel for half the cost of a new pipe, and a stem replacement was much cheaper.

If Lee had inlaid gold stars in replacement stems, they’d likely have cost more than half the price of a new Lee.