Last Thursday, February 13th, there was a curious stream of Zippo advertisements from the mid-20th century on Twitter (courtesy of Pulp Librarian), many of which exhorted consumers to surprise their Valentine with a lighter. The following day, nothing. One of the ads (1953) showed a young red-haired fellow in a sports coat and bowtie, his face smeared from lipstick kisses, with the tagline “…and she gave me a Zippo.” The illustration bore resemblance to those of Norman Rockwell, although even back then I’m not sure The Saturday Evening Post—and definitely not Boy’s Life—would’ve countenanced an overt pro-cigarette image. Could be wrong, I wasn’t born until 1955.
When I was a teenager Bic lighters weren’t yet ubiquitous, and like many smokers, I amassed a sizable collection of matchbooks, many of which had arresting designs. You’d pick up a handful at restaurants, clothing stores, motels, airports, leftovers from cigarette machines (when, depending on what state you lived in, a number of coins were required; in 1973 a pack of Kools in Maryland cost 35 cents, a bargain compared to the 60 cents in my native New York) and even bookstores. Matches cluttered houses (until you ran out and had to search through coat pockets) and were part of the outside litter that was far more prevalent than today.
And then Bics—first on the market in ‘73—put a dent in the matchbook industry, the big clunky ones that nonetheless fit easily in a pocket. (When I was in college, lots of girls smoked and it always struck me as strange as they’d clutch their pack of Salems/Marlboros and a lighter/matches in their hands; how they juggled that with a cup of keg beer was some sort of trick.) In 1990 my wife (then girlfriend) gave me a Zippo as a present, my first, and I was delighted. There was the problem of running out of lighter fluid, but the snap the silver instrument made when alighting a cigarette remains in my memory.
One day, in the New York Press production office at the Puck Building in Lower Manhattan, I was inspecting layouts and, as a nervous tic when on deadline, kept clicking the Zippo in my suit pants. My friend Don Gilbert, the production manager, took notice and said, openly, “Dude, keep that up and you’re going to set your johnson on fire, and that’ll fuck you up for sure!” I thought about it, laughed, and kept a tighter control on my nervous habit. Not long after, I made a brief attempt at quitting (taking a chance on Nicorette gum, which was far worse than cigarettes), and put the Zippo aside. Upon my inevitable resumption of the real thing, dialing down to the “low-tar” Merits, I went back to a mini-Bic and my Zippo days were over. (I still keep a few boxes of matches in my briefcase—from hotels in Hong Kong and Dubai—for emergency purposes.)
Looking back, that small steel accoutrement was a minor piece of Americana that’ll never have a nostalgic mini-resurgence. Smokers are pariahs, uneducated, MAGA goons or bums and spurned by the general public, even outside, and that’s simply a plain truth. My “lived experience.”
But pariahs can rise from the dead, or in the parlance of the last decade, the cancelled. Last week, social media posters consumed with journalists/obnoxious effete pundits were abuzz upon the announcement that Jeffrey Toobin (64, two degrees from Harvard) was hired as a contributing columnist at The New York Times. Toobin, as some might remember, or choose not to, was fired from The New Yorker after he was caught jerking off during an October Zoom conference in 2020. After that incident the Times ran a long story about the cancellation, headlined “The Undoing of Jeffrey Toobin,” in which reporters Katherine Rosman and Jacob Bernstein wrote: “It’s unclear if, when or how Mr. Toobin will return to public life… Amid the 2018 Supreme Court confirmation process for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the journalist scoffed on CNN at Republicans who said white men, as a demographic, were being mistreated. ‘Garbage,’ Mr. Toobin said, ‘All this whining about the poor plight of white men is ridiculous.’”
Less than five years later, Toobin’s at the Times. Doesn’t bother me—the Times roster of objectionable columnists, even after shedding Paul Krugman, is so abysmal, that Toobin (whose initial column about Trump and state attorneys general was fairly anodyne) fits in with the likes of Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, David Brooks, Ezra Klein, Michelle Goldberg, Gail Collins, David French, Frank Bruni and Maureen Dowd.
Nonetheless, there was (fairly puerile) snickering in the media about Toobin’s “redemption.” Andrew Stiles, in The Free Beacon, wrote: “Jeffrey Toobin, one of the world’s most prominent masturbators, is coming to the New York Times… It’s another stroke of luck for the so-called legal analyst…” That’s worth not even half a snicker.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023
