Club Info & Events

Details from the August Meeting
We participated in the usual banter at the last meeting with the primary focus being on placing orders for the 2015 club pipe and an update on our friend Rick. Please see more details about purchasing a club pipe below. Payment due at the September meeting.

A quick update on Rick Frederics. He is home but still feeling the left over affects of his recent procedure. The doc says things are improving slowly and his required visits to the hospital have been reduced so that's a good sign. Still not ready for calls or visits but they'll let us know when the time is right. Just a shout out to Rick from all of his comrades here at SHPC... You're in our thoughts and prayers, get well soon. We look forward to having that long awaited smoke with you. In the meantime, we'll smoke in your honor. Take care.

2015 Club Pipe Update - Money Due This Meeting
Ok folks this is it... time to put in our order for this year's club pipe. The cost is $120 and due at this month's meeting. The email was sent out recently with more details. If you haven't already put in your order, check your email and let me know post haste. We've heard that turn around time for these will be fairly quick so we hope to have them by the October meeting. We have only 8 orders so far but I saw a few more hands up when we first picked this pipe. What do you say Rhode Island? Only one of you has ordered so far.

A New Short Story by Ernie Whitenack

Seems well timed for my visit to the Tinderbox....

From the Intro....
Hitler’s hidden diamonds and gold were allocated to fund a secret organization. It was a terrorist group known as Werwolf (Werewolf) who would disrupt and confuse the Allied occupation, and planned to overthrow the Allies, and then carry the fight to the East and Soviet Russia.

Invisible Enemy

He poured a good portion of Jameson’s from the bottle on the sideboard in the antique filled dining room, added two ice cubes as he read the note from Alma that was propped against the bottle. Knowing him as she did, he would be sure to find it there. She would be home from a shopping trip to Manchester soon. Clancy extracted the oilskin pouch from his hip pocket, and filled his pipe with Tinderbox’s Sherlock’s Choice and half reclined on the white wicker divan. This was his favorite spot on the screened porch. (Read the full Intro and Chapter 1)

No Clear Link Between Passive Smoking and Lung Cancer

This report is from 2013 but I just saw it recently posted on the UPCA's Facebook page and had not seen it before. It's promising news but the question is, will people really buy it? It seems they only want to hear negative reports on tobacco....

(from the Journal of the National Cancer Institute) A large prospective cohort study of more than 76,000 women confirmed a strong association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer but found no link between the disease and secondhand smoke.

“The fact that passive smoking may not be strongly associated with lung cancer points to a need to find other risk factors for the disease [in nonsmokers],” said Ange Wang, the Stanford University medical student who presented the study at the June 2013 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. (read more)

Pipe Sighting - Plymouth, MA

While visiting my son and granddaughter in LA this year I made a point to stop by the "Original" Tinderbox on Wilshire Blvd. Although the location of this shop is not the original location, it is still the first Tinderbox store. Walking through the doors is like stepping back in time and there is not one place you can look where you wouldn't see a pipe, a photo of a famous patron or a tobacco related nick nack. We talked with Jim the manager who has been there for about 18 years. We chatted about Boston, baseball and the golden days of pipe smoking. It seems that although there has been a welcome increase in the interest in pipes in recent years, that interest has not quite caught on here at the Original Tinderbox. But California has some of the strictest smoking laws in the country which I'm sure has a lot to do with that.

I guess you could say I cut my teeth at the Tinderbox. Back in the 80s during my Navy days, going to the Tinderbox in San Diego was like going to Disneyland for me. Looking at all the pipes that adorned the walls and wishing I had enough to buy that Ascorti or Ben Wade. Opening the lids of each of their house blends, taking a sniff and trying to decide which one I'd take home with me that day. I could never go to the mall there without stopping in, even if just to look around. Sadly though, my visit to the Original Tinderbox, although nostalgic, did not live up to my memories of the past. The house blends were all behind the counter and they only had a couple of those blends available. I'm told however, that you can still get these blends at any of the other Tinderbox chain stores or online. I did purchase a couple of those house blends and look forward to rekindling that friendship.

Before I left I took some video of the entire store but unfortunately due to the poor lighting and my lack of attention to detail the video did not come out very good. I managed to salvage a number of stills and put them to music and I hope it will at least give you some sense of how I saw the shop during my visit. See the video above under "Video of the Month."

Although we were the only people in the shop on a Monday morning, just before we left a young gentleman in his late 20s came in and bought some pipe tobacco. Possibly a glimmer of hope of things to come. A big thanks to Jim for keeping us entertained and making us feel welcome. If you're in the LA area, why not stop by and say hello and add a little tinder to the box.