Here are three ads for Lucky Strike cigarettes that will be familiar to early Baby Boomers. Dorothy Collins, the singer in the second ad, was a star of the TV show “Your Hit Parade.” I don’t know the guy in the third ad, but, boy, he’s clutching that Lucky like it’s the last one on earth.
As I watched this, I wondered if kids whose parents worked in the tobacco industry were told by classmates that their dads or moms were merchants of death, like the kids of servicemen used to hear from anti-war classmates. We might demonize tobacco now, but Durham was built on it and still enjoys the benefits of its legacy.
