Dean considers smoking

The other day I was watching a rerun of the game show Match Game from 1975. (I don’t need to explain why. Don’t judge me.) Patty Duke Astin (you know, from The Patty Duke Show, “loves to rock and roll, a hot dog makes her lose control”) was one of the panelists, and right there, in front of the studio audience and a national television audience, she lit up a cigarette. No one on the show made a comment about it. Smoking was an accepted part of the culture.

It dominated bar culture; back then, you expected a bar to have ashtrays -- and they would be used. Bars in movies were smoky places because bars in life were smoky places. Merle Haggard’s song “Swinging Doors” includes the line, “this old smoke filled bar.” Moe Bandy called a song “Smoke Filled Bars.”

But times have changed. We live in California, where it’s been illegal to smoke in bars for over twenty years. Even in 2016, when we visited bars in every state, we didn’t see (or smell) smoke in most bars. Smoking is still allowed in some places in some states. (Those states, if you’re curious, are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas. Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.) We visited two bars, in Alaska and Oklahoma, where the bar’s management had decided to do away with smoking even though it was still legal.

In Oklahoma, people lit up on an outside patio, and we were surprised when we talked with smokers to find they were happy with the policy. A guy tried to light up in the bar in Alaska (the no-smoking policy had only been in effect for four days), so I assume he wasn’t happy with the policy.

It’s clear that a majority of people in the United States support smoking bans. There always is a balance between personal freedom and the rights of others; as a nation, we’ve decided people need to tobacco-free.

We found it interesting that on our trip, the place that was most friendly toward smoking wasn’t a bar, but a church. We went to Scum of the Earth Church in Denver, Colorado, which had a “smoking pastor” who sat on the church’s front porch to make other smokers feel welcome. We never encountered a bar with somebody hired to smoke outside and welcome people -- unless you count one of the owners of Blazing Saddle in Des Moines, Iowa.

In American history, smoking was celebrated in high society, on the stage and screen, in offices and, of course, bars. Churches were the one place smoking was condemned. “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, and don’t go with girls who do” was a popular saying in fundamentalist churches.

The United States has, for the most part, come around to the church’s view on smoking, while disagreeing on almost everything else. We’ll keep going to the smoke-free environments of bars (and churches). But every once in a while, we’ll step outside. There are some pretty great people to talk to who’ve been exiled outside with their cigarettes.