American (and also English) pipe makers made and sold millions of cheap pipes a year during the Depression years, at what Lord Inverchapel in 1946 lamented was fifty cents and sold by the gross, to be given away as gifts.
And in Washington Missouri, there used to be twenty corn cob pipe factories, selling corn cob pipes by the dozens and by a gross.
One of my legal assistants a few years ago saw my Kaywoodies and said her father smoked that brand, with the shamrock. He’d died a few years earlier.
Larcenously, I asked what became of them, and she said when he’d died the pipes all looked dirty, and they’d tossed them.
A whole lot of pipes used to be thrown away and replaced, or trashed when the owner died.
It’s common knowledge that Albert Einstein was a pipe smoker. Him with his pipe are a stock image of him in our minds. His contemporaries claimed he’d smoke one until it got sour or burnt out and buy another.
The frequenters of a pipe forum today are pipe lovers that baby their pipes.
If you picked out one, and smoked it all day, in maybe a year you’d bite through the stem, or it would get sour, or cake up so badly you’d need another one.
But if kept clean, dry, and rotated and cake kept down, and not smoked in the wind, I personally know a late 1940’s ten dollar grade Lee Three Star will smoke cool and sweet for three quarters of a century and counting.