190. The Peterson – Tinder Box Erin System
I was doing graduate work in Charlottesville, Virginia in the late 1980s, and like most graduate students was somewhere between desperately poor and totally impoverished. I had dropped my glasses and one lens had a spectacular spider-web crack making it impossible to see without closing that eye. There was no hope of getting a new pair until the next financial aid check came in a few months, but somehow I scrounged together enough money to buy a tin of Mac Barens Virginia No. 1. Some things are more important than others, right? So off I went to Cavalier Pipes and Tobaccos, the only remaining tobacconist in that university town, the legendary Mincer’s having long since divested itself of its smoker’s equipage. While most pipe-smokers didn’t know it, the late 80s were still the dark days of the hobby, which had plummeted in the mid-1980s and wouldn’t rise on the coat-tails of the Great Cigar Boom until the early ’90s. Tobacconists had for the most part become upscale tchotchke shops, as my beloved Yiddish friend Linda would say, with flavored popcorn, walking sticks, umbrellas, porcelain ballerinas, men’s cologne and maybe a tray or two of pipes and a few tins of tobacco. This one was in transition, with about half its real estate taken over by tchotchkes. But the other half was still a respectable pipe & tobacco shop, carrying Ser Jacopo, Dunhill, Sasieni and Comoy’s, and (of course) Peterson pipes. On the day I went in with impaired vision, Jim the proprietor had a tray of Peterson Dunmore Systems (c. 1979-84). At the time I had in my Peterson rotation my beloved 309, a 1980 DeLuxe 11s and a 1981 Mark Twain. Even with one eye, I knew I had to have a Dunmore 02 System, and after some negotiations first with Jim and then later with my wife, the price was met. I don’t remember how we did it, but somehow we did. And that’s the first time I’d heard of a System line apart from the Standard, Premier and De Luxe. As readers of The Peterson Pipe: The Story of Kapp & Peterson know, there have actually been a number of other System lines, most of them fairly scarce on the estate market. The most recent examples are the 2019 St. Patrick’s Day commemorative, the 2018 Pub Pipe and the 2018 Spigot System, the latter two still in production. Beginning in 1975 (and in no particular order), these lines also included the Centenary System; the Mark Twain commemorative; the STAR, a red-stained gorgeous-grained line with sterling mounts; the Cara, a hand-selected nickel-mount line for Mario Lubinski’s Italian market; the Gold Block, a premium for those who collected enough coupons from Ogden’s Gold Block tobacco in the UK; the Connemara Premier Rustic of the renowned “pebble grain” rustication; the Sculpted and Aboriginal, briar and meer Systems with a scalloped smooth and sometimes partially rusticated finish); the Dublin with Briar Circle high grade; the Supreme ultra-high and the Tinder Box…