Monthly Archives: August 2020

Jørgen Jensen is a name familiar to you if you've read the comments section of this blog for long. I always look for his verdict as soon as I get out of bed the morning a new post appears, and if it's not there I figure I've got a problem. He is pictured above (left) in rapt conversation with Peterson's master-craftsman Paddy Larrigan (right) at the Sallynoggin factory in the mid-1990s. I've heard only bits and pieces of his life as a Peterson smoker and collector but have, at last, convinced him to share a few of his pipes and highlights of his life as a pipe smoker and Peterson aficionado with readers. Today I have more than 400 unsmoked pipes and 134 of them are Petersons. I’ve lost count of the smoked pipes I have, but I can tell you 102 of them are Petes. I was 14 when I started smoking a pipe back in 1962. Two of my friends had pipes, and I liked their smoke. So I went to my father and got one of his old pipes and some tobacco, and I’ve been smoking ever since—at home, on the street, at work—everywhere. Back then, a 4th or 5th grade BBB was 12.50 kr. For my first pipe, I could only manage to come up with 10.50 kr. Then in 1964 my father gave me an Orlik, my first really good pipe. I still have it. Two years later, in the spring of 1966, I was paid 214 kr. for 88 hours of overtime. I went straight up to the finest tobacconist in town and brought  another great English pipe, a Loewe Newlyn for 80 kr. People just shook their heads—that was too much money for a young man to spend on a single pipe! A dozen of England's finest Of course in those days, everyone thought a good pipe was an English pipe. But by the 1970s, all the great English pipes were disappearing in Denmark. Little by little, Irish pipes began to appear. So I found myself going over to Peterson. Sometimes people ask me why I don't smoke Danish pipes, which are supposed to be so great. I have a few, but I've never really liked them—their lines are too soft, too delicate. They look like they’re made for women. By the time we got to the 1990s, it was over in Denmark as far as tobacco was concerned for the little man. A 50 gram packet or tin went from 16 to 40 kr. Of course it's only gotten worse here, our last tobacco hike occurring just this past April. I got a pretty big check not too long ago and spent it all on tobacco, instead of pipes like I'd usually do. In 1993 the madam (my wife Birgitte) said, “We’re going to Paris.” “No,” I said, “I think we’d better go to Ireland," thinking about pipes. We ended up in Paris.  Then the next year the madam said, “You said…