The Yankee Doodle Cigar Box

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Yankee Doodle Cigar Box

Open the old cigar box,
Get me a Cuba stout
For things are running crossways,
And Maggie and I are out

- Kipling

The decay of civilization continues with the demise of the cigar box.

In the not-so-long-ago even the cheapest cigars (Roi-Tan – “The Cigar That Breathes”) were sold in wooden boxes secured with little brass nails.

Little boys didn’t smoke cigars (well…once or twice…) themselves, but a castoff cigar box was a childhood treasure, a source of almost-raw materials for building toy forts, airplanes, cars, ships, and army tanks.

A cigar box also served as a pirate’s treasure chest for hiding old pocketknives, marbles, Canadian pennies, firecrackers from last Christmas, brass washers, keys without locks, locks without keys, a Timex wristwatch that didn’t run anymore, stubs of pencils, bits of chalk, string, airplane glue, crayons, .22 shell casings, pliers, screwdrivers, dice, and a little plastic disc that, when tilted, made a tiny hunter in a boat lift his shotgun and bring down a duck.

Every child took a cigar box to school to hold crayons, those dinky, stamped-metal, blunt-nosed scissors, and that crumbly white paste which wouldn’t stick anything together. The labels remained, which would now be forbidden under state law as promoting the use of tobacco by children.

Some manufacturers sold empty no-name boxes as school supplies for a time, but these were quickly superseded by the now ubiquitous and iniquitous transparent plastic boxes which somehow seem un-American.

Wooden cigar boxes for cheap machine brands were first replaced by thick, heavy cardboard. These were sturdy enough for squirreling away little oddments in a drawer, but wholly inadequate for building another USS Texas, a bomber, or a railroad station for the three-rail O-gauge (the Marx vs Lionel vs American Flyer debate is deferred).

Sadly, grocery store cigars no longer come in real boxes at all; they are tucked into folding envelopes of thin cardboard, useless in every way. Straight shame.

After the Depression and World War II, the concept of “the richest nation on earth” was almost as much a fiction as it is now. National prosperity didn’t much come down to ex-G.I.’s, but they figured they were blessed in having jobs and food and no one shooting at them, and the promise of a better future. A J. C. Higgins on the gun rack instead of a garand, a pair of dress shoes instead of combat boots for going to church, and the luxury of a six-cent cigar after work or down at the American Legion - all spoke of small victories.

The names of those brands return from the past: Roi Tan, King Edward, Wm Penn, Dutch Masters, White Owl, Phillies, El Producto, Muriel, Swisher Sweets, John Ruskin, most of which have gone the way of the Missouri Pacific, Pan American, and Studebaker. The plain wooden boxes in which those cheap, machine-made, post-war cigars awaiting the touch of the match contained more than cigars, they were cultural artifacts.

Cardboard just won’t do.

Where now is the modern boy to hide his old pocketknives, marbles, Canadian pennies, firecrackers from last Christmas, brass washers, keys without locks, locks without keys, a Timex wristwatch that doesn’t run anymore, stubs of pencils, bits of chalk, string, airplane glue, crayons, .22 shell casings, pliers, screwdrivers, dice, and a little plastic disc that, when tilted, makes a tiny hunter in a boat lift his shotgun and bring down a duck?

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