There was a time in Durham when you could smell tobacco on hot, humid summer nights, and not so long ago. The’80s, as a matter of fact. American Tobacco had not yet closed shop to move to Reidsville. Ligget & Myers was still manufacturing. And each late summer and fall the tobacco warehouse that used to be located on what is no the parking lot below the downtown YMCA would ring with auctioneer calls.
All that’s gone now. The demonization of tobacco has come full circle. The powers that be consider it a tocsin but are content to take the taxes it brings in.
I ran across this painting from a Lucky Strike ad in a 1942 LIFE magazine. It occurred to me that the people in this painting, which was “painted from life,” according to the ad, might have been from around these parts.
