In 1944, a newspaper in Gary, Indiana held a beauty contest to select a "Miss Gary Cigaret." The public were encouraged to vote, with each vote costing five cents. All the funds raised would be used to send cigarettes to American soldiers.
Over $15,000 was eventually raised, which was able to buy six million cigarettes (or 300,000 packs).
The contest winner, Irene Kuchta, got to model a bathing suit made of cigarettes.
Vidette-Messenger of Porter County - Sep 22, 1944
Windsor Star - Sep 9, 1944
The entire patent, figure and text, is given below. How I wish the inventor had gone on at length about his design.
Peter Hlookoff had an unusual strategy to avoid being convicted for possession of marijuana — he always carried a container of alfalfa with him.
His reasoning was that alfalfa and marijuana smell similar (so he claimed). So if the police ever arrested him for possession of marijuana he could claim that it was actually alfalfa they had smelled (or seen him smoking).
This strategy was put to the test in Dec 1967 when the police raided his apartment and arrested him for smoking pot. During the subsequent court case his defense led to the magistrate arranging for a court employee to smoke marijuana so that its smell could be compared to alfalfa.
Victoria Times Colonist - May 10, 1968
Unfortunately the courtroom experiment was cancelled before it took place, and the magistrate ended up finding Hlookoff guilty. He didn't buy Hlookoff's follow-up argument that if, perhaps, it had been marijuana he was smoking then someone must have (without his knowledge) put marijuana in his alfalfa container.
The Vancouver Province - July 3, 1968
Hlookoff's roommate, Marcel Horne (a professional firebreather whose stage name was 'El Diablo'), later
wrote an autobiography in which he revealed that, yeah, they were absolutely smoking pot when the police raided their apartment:
It was now December 12, 1967, Peter Hlookoff, who was now co-editor of the Georgia Straight, and I were up in my room around one o'clock in the morning. I was lying under a sun lamp to get a tan and was high on grass. Peter sat in the middle of the floor with a roach in one hand and enough dope for three cigarettes in a plastic tube on the floor beside him.
We were rapping away very stoned, when we heard someone coming up the stairs. The next thing we knew two cops in uniform walked into the room. Peter tried to drop the roach but the cop saw him. I was too stoned to think properly so I just lay there watching the nightmare. The cops put us up against the wall and frisked us. "Who does the marijuana belong to?" We both answered, "What marijuana?"
image source: Annals of the Firebreather (1973), by Marcel Horne
Seemed odd to me that the ad would not only mention that they've got "a patent on flavor," but also give the patent number (
3828800). So I had to look it up. Turned out to be a fairly boring patent for "an improved cigarette filter material... formed from the porous, granular salt of a weakly basic anion exchange resin."
Sports Illustrated - Nov 14, 1977
Coos Bay World - Nov 4, 1978
Perhaps it prevented fires caused by burning matches, but what about the fires caused by cigarette butts?
Popular Science - Apr 1936
We posted a few days ago about a
smoking poodle. Now here's a smoking blue jay.
Greenwood Commonwealth (Mississippi) - Dec 8, 1962
image source: NY Journal American archive
"Taking a break from soliciting support for the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation, 'Koko' the poodle pauses for a cigarette."
New York Journal American - Jan 18, 1952
Rapid City Journal - Feb 18, 1950
New York Daily News - Nov 8, 1953
Dr. William Neutra claimed that he could know a person's personality simply by observing the way they held a cigarette. At least, a man's personality. Women, he believed, were too "affected and unnatural" as smokers, and so didn't reveal much of their true personality.
The two illustrated articles below were published twenty years apart. Note that some of the interpretations differ, such as the gesture that he believes indicates a "hail fellow."
Life - May 8, 1939
Harrisburg Telegraph - Sep 6, 1939
Caper Magazine - May 1959