The following is a letter I wrote to Ron Blackner, a Brittish pipe-smoker and active contributor to the alt.smokers.pipes newsgroup. Ron's Homepage contains an excellent list of noteworthy briar buffs.

Subject: More Pipesmoking Celebrities...
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 21:46:02 -0300
From: Robert Engbers <info@design-factory.com>
Organization: The Design Factory
To: rblack@innotts.co.uk

Dear Ron,

I was pleased to discover the pipe-smoking celebrities list on your website. You might also want to include Alberts Einstein and Schweitzer, and Jean Piaget (the educator, linguist, and inventor of the cognitive sciences). In the Sherlock Holmes area, you should also mention the British actor Jeremy Brett, now sadly gone.

My favorite pipe-smoking “celebrity” is a little on the obscure side, but...here goes! He was Robert Maynard Hutchins, the former president of the University of Chicago, hater of compulsory courses and the rote memorization of useless data. His “Great Books” program made reading of the literary classics a purely voluntary affair. His undergrads responded by taking extra classes and making Aristotle the college bookstore’s all-time best-seller. The man enjoyed his briars (primarily saddle-stemmed, pencil-shank billiards) and clearly knew how to relax. He once said: “Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.”

My second favorite brother of the briar is New York City’s former congressman and mayor, Fiorello La Guardia—a tireless champion of poor and working-class people. A framed photo of mine shows him smoking a 3/4 bent Kaywoodie. The American socialist and organizer Eugene V. Debs was a pipesmoker, and also the only presidential candidate in history to conduct his campaign from prison (where he was serving a ten-year sentence for criticizing American participation in WWI). He got nearly a million votes. On the dark side of the political spectrum, we find the pipesmoker Allen Dulles (brother of John Foster Dulles) who helped draft the CIA’s charter in 1947 and then became the Agency's longest-serving director. His dictator-toppling, civil war-fomenting, and red-baiting antics were to become standard operating procedure during his tenure, and they remain with us today.

I understand that baseball greats Babe Ruth, Johnny Mize, and Ducky Medwick smoked pipes, as did Billy Martin (you may remeber his Captain Black television endorsements “Never a bite in a bowl!”).

Dale Carnegie—author of How to Win Friends & Influence People (which sold 20 million copies worldwide) smoked pipes, favoring sandblasts with deep bents.

The great Hollywood director John Ford should not escape mention, and the critic, poet, editor, teacher and literary historian, Malcolm Cowley also smoked pipes.

The American expatriate artist Man Ray smoked a pipe, as did photographers Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and André Kertész. I have seen several photographs of Marcel Duchamp puffing on a briar.

As far as I know, only Jeremy Brett, Babe Ruth, and Albert Einstein were mentioned in the second edition Richard Carleton Hacker's The Ultimate Pipe Book, (Beverly Hills: Autumngold Publishing, 1989, ©1984). I ferreted out the rest from books and photographs.

Sadly, television pioneers Edward R. Murrow and Rod Serling were heavy cigarette smokers who did NOT smoke pipes. Both died young—and let that be a lesson to all of us!

Anyway, that's my lengthy—though far from complete—pipesmokers list.

Peace!
—Robert Engbers
--------------------------------------------------------
“Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
                                            —Henry David Thoreau
--------------------------------------------------------