250. R. Dixon Smith: Sherlockian, Cinéaste, Bluegrass Musician & Peterson Lover
This week I'm very pleased to present, in his own words, a little about Pete Geek Dixon Smith's extraordinarily varied & rich life, in his own words. Sherlock Holmes and Basil Rathbone were major influences in how I came to smoke a pipe. I read a lot of the Holmes stories when I was twelve, but during the summer of 1965 I read all sixty stories back to back. When I bought my first pipe in the spring of 1967, I was aware of the fact that Holmes and Rathbone had whetted my appetite for pipes and pipe smoking. I bought it from a tobacconist in New Haven, Connecticut. It was a bent Dublin with a dark, Heritage-like stain, which I selected from a basket. I still have the pipe, but apart from its shape and coloration I know nothing about it, for it is, alas, unbranded. A pity, for I believe it to be of fine quality, as it has always delivered a dry, cool, sweet smoke. Most of my first pipes came out of baskets, so I was not particularly aware of the aesthetics of pipe smoking until the 1980s. By 1968 I was living in Minnesota and buying the occasional pipe from the Tobak Shop in St. Paul. Some were from baskets, others weren’t. Throughout the ’70s I smoked pipes with an old friend named Tom Tietze, who owned what seemed to me to be a lot of pipes, including many Petersons. I came to appreciate the aesthetics of Peterson pipes through exposure to Tom’s pipes. This led me to purchase my first Peterson, a De Luxe System (20S), in 1981. Peterson pipes were more attractive than other pipes, and they were sweeter and cooler as well. In the 1980s and ’90s, I had another friend—another book collector—who had about two-hundred Peterson pipes, and it was at this time, and because of examining many of Peder Wagtskjold’s finest Petersons, that my appreciation of their design aesthetics took hold. I’ve never bought a non-Peterson pipe since. My favorite Peterson shapes include the pub pipe, churchwardens (124, D16), tankards, Kapp Royals (106, B11, 221), straight apples, bent Dublins, and bent calabashes. My current favorite line is the Summertime 2018 / Buren line. I smoke four System pipes: my 1981 De Luxe System (20S), a 1986 System Standard (305) and two Pub pipes, one smooth and one rustic—which is my single favorite shape. As for tobacco, I enjoy IQ Blend (a mild, lightly vanilla-coated aromatic) and My Mixture 965, a full-bodied latakia blend that reminds me of the Balkan Sobranie I used to smoke in the ’70s and ’80s. There is another connection for me between Sherlock Holmes and Peterson pipes that illuminates my love of the marque. Sherlock Holmes is even more popular in Japan than he is in England or America. I’ve met a number of Japanese Sherlockians, and they all explain the fascination in similar terms. They are devoted to the Sherlock Holmes stories because the world…