They knew a lot more than the adults gave them credit for.
They knew that parents, teachers, store clerks and tobacco companies — especially tobacco companies — were plotting to keep the most delicious pleasure in life away from them.
Nobody turned into monsters if they ran out of candy, did they? Nobody went out on an icy night to pick up Rollos or Zagnuts. But the boys saw adults do exactly that for cigarettes. A poster in their classroom showed Indians explaining the miracle of tobacco to the colonists. A poster in their classroom showed Indians explaining the miracle of tobacco to the colonists.
A pack holds 20 cigarettes in three rows. The boys observed when there are eight to fifteen in the pack, they could steal one or two without anyone suspecting.
In their neighborhood was a pretty church with a graveyard sloping down to a creek. Under a bridge where no one could see them, the boys lit up. Pedaling up School Section Road, when the younger of the two became nauseous, he and his bike hit the blacktop. The handlebar cut into his eyebrow.
His family allowed the kids to smoke when they turned 16, soon after that the Army issued him a carton with his field rations. But two packs a day started giving him bad headaches and the Surgeon General’s warnings were becoming graphic, it took him three years and several attempts to quit. It was kind of ugly.
As a reformed smoker, he sent a letter about second-hand smoke to the newspaper and damned if it wasn’t published. HIs mother, whose Raleighs he had stolen and who still smoked, mentioned she had read it.
He had developed skills attractive to tobacco companies and as long as their product was legal, he told himself, he could work on their ads. But he hated doing it. He would quit two jobs and turn down an opportunity for his own agency to introduce a low-tar brand in Israel. He kicked the habit for the second time.
Somehow his lungs had been spared — they expanded and contracted twenty thousand times a day. And although no one could see the nicotine stains on his hands, they were there. 
