275. Jason Canady’s St. Patrick’s Day Master Collection
Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit! Happy St. Patrick's Day to you! Jason is the first Pete Geek to my knowledge to have assembled every single year of the St. Patrick’s Day commemoratives, a series which began back in 1998. In so doing, he has cleared up the mystery of the missing 1999 SPD: there wasn’t one. He’s also documented just how special the original 1998 St. Patrick’s Day issue was intended to be. Like a few other K&P releases over the years, it seems to have had two names originally: the “Tri-Colour” (which the Irish call their flag) and the “St. Patrick’s Day.” All the 1998s in Jason’s collection have spectacular grain as well, and he’s gathered enough of them to convince me this was no entry-grade line in its first year, at least. To see such a collection at a pipe show was once common fare for those able to go to such shows. Now that the emphasis at pipe shows has moved away from sharing collections and trading between pipemen to artisan makers, estate dealers and retailers, it seems to me that we can nevertheless thank the internet for giving us a platform for sharing with one another. Thanks, Jason, for inviting us to enjoy this outstanding Peterson collection. It's a rare treat. -Mark In 2006, I got a job working at the Savannah Morning News in Savannah, Georgia. It’s there that I fell in love with the Saint Patrick’s Day holiday. Savannah is full of Irish descendants who take the holiday seriously, and the city boasts one of the largest SPD parades in the world. Though I’ve since moved back to my hometown in North Carolina, I still treat the holiday with fervor and take the day off from work. It’s a good time to visit my local Irish pub, smoke that year’s Peterson SPD model and pair it with a cold pint. After I became a fan of Peterson pipes, it was only natural for me to gravitate to collecting Petersons with stamps that commemorate my favorite holiday. 1998 SPD 106 The first Peterson SPD pipe I purchased was a 1998 106 model that someone was selling with a Chacom pipe in a package deal. I resold the French pipe and socked away the Peterson in a cigar box. I’d never seen a pipe sporting the colors of the Irish flag on a band and I knew it was special. THE HUNT I don’t know exactly when it happened, but one day I realized I had about four SPD pipes in consecutive years. That’s when the idea first came to me to collect one model from each year. I remember saying to myself, “Jason, that’s crazy. There’s too many pipes. Even if you got them all, you’re looking at adding over 20 pipes to your collection.” I reasoned it would be a large collection for any piper just in itself. But I love a good hunt, and soon I started stringing together consecutive years.…