About a week before Father’s Day 1953, the Pipe and Tobacco Council issued a press release cautioning women who planned to buy a pipe as a gift “for their man” to be sure they chose one that complemented his “qualities and contours.” “A young thin-faced fellow will be lost behind the massive bowl of the Bulldog,” the council advised. To avoid such faux pas, the council counseled how to match the pipe to the man:

     The Dublin for the square-jawed man.
     The Lumberman for the college freshman.
     The Pot or Club for the man with “larger than average features.”
     The Bulldog for the strapping athlete or outdoorsman.
     A curved pipe for the genial (i.e., heavyset) male.

“Since every man feels the impulse to light up as soon as he bends his fingers around a new bowl,” the council helpfully added, “it would be wise to include tobacco as part of the present.” The council recommended a heavier-than-average smoke for the he-man with muscles, and a milder, more aromatic brand for the desk-bound executive.

Pipe smoking, of course, has gone the way of the homburg and tailfins. In 1970, 52 million pounds of pipe tobacco were sold in the United States. In 2007, about five million pounds were sold, and about a third of that was low-grade tobacco from the Middle East used in hookah (water) pipes.

There’s no way to spin it. “The pipe industry is a shell of its former self,” Norm Sharp told me. Norm is the head of the Pipe Tobacco Council, the successor to the Pipe and Tobacco Council. He is, in other words, the pipe industry’s lobbyist in Washington.

The dramatic decline in pipe smoking is certainly attributable to the growing awareness of the dangers of using tobacco. But Norm believes something else happened. “My feeling is that it was cultural and societal,” he said. “Pipe smoking harkens back to a different time. It’s slow and deliberate, and that just doesn’t appeal to a fast-paced society. You need to buy a pipe, break it in, clean it – that just doesn’t appeal to younger people.”

In 1987, anti-smoking activists forced the toymaker Hasbro to stop selling Mr. Potato Head with his signature pipe. The company even staged an event where Mr. Potato Head symbolically “surrendered” his pipe to Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. (Ironically, Koop himself occasionally smoked a pipe until the early 1970s.) To Norm Sharp, that was a bit much.

“Look, we all know kids experiment with ‘adult pleasures,’” Norm said. “Well, kids don’t even think about experimenting with pipe tobacco. It’s not even on their radar.”

For the record, Harry Truman wasn’t a smoker, though he wasn’t fervently opposed to the habit: he kept an ashtray on his desk in the Oval Office. And, as the picture below shows, his maternal grandmother, Harriet Young, enjoyed smoking a corncob pipe until the day she died.

(Photo courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library)