Pipes that our mentors smoked

Pipe & Hardware discussions
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Pipes that our mentors smoked

Post by Bloodhound »

When I was a kid, there were 2 men in my life that smoked pipes. My uncle Bill and Harry, the husband of my mom's friend.

Uncle Bill was a mechanic who worked for a dealership in Denver. He was more of a cigar guy, but he had 3 pipes that he kept on the kitchen table to smoke at lunch and on the weekends. 2 were Dr. Grabow and one Kaywoodie.
All 3 looked just like this pipe.
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Harry was a shift manager with Gates Rubber Company and later with Coors. He had several pipes, I don't think I ever knew what brands they were, but I remember a huge rusticated billiard and a large bent pipe like this onegold trim and all.
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My pipes tastes have wandered far afield, but several years ago I went looking for a pipe, it had to be a big billiard like Uncle Bill's and I ended up getting a Comoy that is very much like on of his pipes.

I also decided to watch for a big squat rusticated billiard like Harry's and while looking I found a basket pipe in the same shape as the gold trimmed pipe that Harry had. Then Winton sent me the Marshal Field pipe and it is the spitting image of Harry's big rusticated billiard.

Do you look for pipes just like your pipe mentors, or do you already have them? I am still a long shank guy...I like the Canadian, the Lovat and the Lumberman shapes the best...but there are pipes in the pile that reflect the tastes of my pipe mentors.

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Pipes that our mentors smoked

Post by Hugo Drax »

A pipe thread? Neat!

Absolutely. I smoke mainly pre-war pipes in general and Comoy's in particular because Mr. Jimmy Campbell loved them. Even more so, I favor Astley's and Fribourg and Treyer virginias because of Mr. Campbell--he taught me to smoke and well, I've never changed much.

I love long Lovats and saddle-bit dublins because that's what Sir Johnny Scott smoked, and I hang my pipe off my eye teeth because I watched him do it one day, gave it a try, and found it damned comfortable.

I smoke FredS pipes every once in a while because, well, FredS a pretty even-keeled guy and maybe that makes him a pipe mentor, too.
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Pipes that our mentors smoked

Post by JimVH »

Great idea for a thread.

My grandpa. The only pipe I ever saw him smoke was a Grabow Viking with a rusticated bowl.

Guess what my first pipe purchase was as a teenager? I have three or four of them that I reach for on occasion. It’s a comfort pipe.
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Pipes that our mentors smoked

Post by sweetandsour »

My dad smoked a plain briar billiard type pipe that looked like the KW that Bloodhound posted a pic of above, and in fact it could have been a KW. I wish I had it; I've no idea what ultimately happened to it, but he smoked a variety, including Cherry Blend, Granger, Sir Walter, Carter Hall and all of the other drug store blends.

My Uncle Dick had a Grabow Viking or Falcon, mostly a Falcon, in his teeth pretty much all day every day. Same for Herb, who owned the local Gulf gas station in town. Both smoked Sir Walter exclusively.

A navy vet that everyone called "Chief", was a salesman at the plant where I got my first job after college. He gave me a hand carved free hand bent billiard and a pouch of IR 3-Star Blue, which was his daily smoke. Sadly and very stupidly, I later passed that pipe along to another co-worker. My first boss at that plant smoked Mixture 79 in some sort of old beat up odd looking bent bulldog pipe. Mixture 79 tasted much different back then (late 70s) than it does now. We were all sitting around in the lab one afternoon close to get-off time, smoking our pipes and having a last cup of coffee, and I still remember the plant manager walking in and exclaiming, "What the hell is this? The king and his court?" Those were good old days, now long gone, but still alive in my memory by the grace of God.
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Pipes that our mentors smoked

Post by Bloodhound »

The List of my mentors here on this site and the old site reads like a Whos Who of CPS. I have pipes from many of the members...some from the old site and some who have been on both sites and some who are no longer with us...

I have some pipes from the carvers here and I am convinced that their Best Pipe ever is the one that made it to my pile. :D

Seems like a couple times a year, I get all the pipes out and then I get nostalgic as I remember where each on came from and from whom, or a special time I smoked them.

My uncle Bill and Harry are now passed on, I did get to smoke with Uncle Bill a couple of times...good memories

OK...enough of that mush...back to our regularly scheduled program
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Pipes that our mentors smoked

Post by Hugo Drax »

Nah. There isn't enough manly mush out there anymore, Bloodhound. We've become a hardened people,, I think, and I enjoy having the old heartstrings tweaked.

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Pipes that our mentors smoked

Post by Bloodhound »

I smoked a Comoy Billiard last night...it was the last pipe that Rusty and I communicated about. I thought of him while I smoked...
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Pipes that our mentors smoked

Post by mcommini »

One of the first pipes I ever got was a Savinelli rhodesian that looked very similar to a pipe Anthony Hopkins smoked as CS Lewis in the movie Shadowlands.

I almost bought a freehand pipe not long ago that was very similar to a freehand my dad smokes that I have long admired. Alas, I kept my PAD in check, resolving to buy the pipe once I could responsibly afford it. By the time I went back to the store the next week the pipe was gone and one like it has not since reappeared. I do have a lion's head meerschaum rather similar to my favorite of my dad's pipes when I was a wee lad- from the age of 3 on I referred to it as his "Aslan pipe".

It wasn't conscious upon purchase- in fact, I didn't even realize it until I read this thread, but my rusticated Savinelli is very similar to at least one of the pipes in my uncle John's rather extensive collection. I have fond memories of being a teenager visiting my grandparents in Mississippi and waking during the summer months to the aroma of pipe smoke drifting through my open window as my dad and uncle John would be enjoying their pipes along with coffee on the front porch. Alas, I never got to join Uncle John on that front porch - he passed sometime in 2005 or 06, and the front porch itself (along with the rest of my grandparent's house) went up in a fire a few years ago.

Uncle John was an interesting cat- he married into our family when I was a teenager, my aunt's fourth husband. Uncle John was kind of the anti-Mike Warnke- he actually did spend some time as a high priest in one of the many Satanic/Pagan/New Age covens that popped up all over the place in the '70s and also a decently high profile "psychic" to the celebrities. His testimony didn't involve outlandish claims of human (or animal, really) sacrifice, and while he recounted many of their magical ceremonies it was not to tantalize with ideas of dark spiritual forces wreaking havoc but to show how everything they did were elaborate magic tricks. He devoted his time from his conversion to Christianity in the '80s to the end of his life going around to different churches and debunking satanic/pagan/new agey "miracles" (with the occasional dig at Christian "faith healers" when he felt the audience needed it) as well as the more extreme rumors about the religion itself that was spreading like wildfire amidst the "Satanic Panic".

He'd open his demonstration by doing a few psychic readings that would put John Edwards to shame and demonstrate "powers" such as walking across glass (or if we were meeting outdoors, fire), psychically reading notes from audience members through his finger-tips whilst he was blindfolded, and removing tumors without surgery. Then he would tell everyone exactly how to do it, no need for demonic power.

(Incidentally, if you ever see "former Satanist turned Christian" claiming otherwise, check how often they make appearances on TBN. Con artists know their marks)

Ironically, he would often get at least one member of the church he was visiting tell him afterward that he obviously was getting his power from God and needed to stop quenching the Spirit.

He attended Baptist churches to his dying day, but openly smoked pipes and cigars and drank alcohol, defending the practices from pastor to layman who challenged him. In general, he relished being a heretic, challenging whatever the church he was going to was teaching that he felt happened to be wrong based on his interpretation of Scripture. This is, I think, more than pipes and alcohol, was what bonded my father to him as a kindred spirit. He was disfellowshipped from more than one church, for some reason....

Yet for such a skeptical man, he also dove whole-heartedly into NWO/black helicopter/men-in-black/Freemasons/Illuminati taking over the world conspiracy theories, releasing several videos to warn the world of these dangers. I remember him and my aunt chewing me out when I was 18 for not taking the y2k bug seriously and hunkering in a bunker with food, guns, and Bibles- despite the fact that my dad was at the time contracting out to several corporations working to fix the bug, and knew (along with most other techies in the field at the time) that the bug, while lucrative, wasn't all that serious. But Uncle John was absolutely convinced that Y2K would bring about an apocalypse that would allow the NWO to take over.

I have, of course, been smoking the rusticated pipe as I type this, remembering waking up on dewy Mississippi summer mornings, the aroma of pipe smoke and coffee drifting into my room along with the voices of two men engaged in intense theological discussion.
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Pipes that our mentors smoked

Post by joegoat »

I didn't have a mentor per se, but my buddy and I watch a YouTube video to figure out how to use or MM cobs and relabeled Lane 1Q.
We found one made by a shop in Minnesota. The fellow had a Savinelli Nonpareil. Ever since I have wanted one. I have yet to find the right one though.
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Pipes that our mentors smoked

Post by Bloodhound »

Because of a friend on the old site, I purchased a Stanwell #11. It came to me from a country in the former USSR. I wasn't sure it would ever make it to my mailbox, but it did and it has been a good pipe for memories...why I got it, where it came from, where & when I have smoked it...It is another special pipe
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