327. Shimshon Cook, CPG: Sparking A Dialogue with Petes & Lighters
Growing up in North Texas in the late 70’s – early 80’s was an experience. Doing so with grandparents who were farmers and sharecroppers only added to it. Their outlook on life and what was important was forged in the Great Depression of their childhood and early teens. I recall Saturday nights at my father’s parents house. We lived a couple blocks from them and spent some of every afternoon at their home after school while my folks were still at work. My grandmother’s siblings (there were 12 of them all together) would play poker Friday and Saturday nights most weeks. This exposed me to the world of cussing, Seagram’s 7 and 7Up, gambling, dirty jokes and tobacco. There were typical cigarette smokers, (most of them my parents’ generation) and then a few smokeless tobacco users, who included the infamous Uncle Leon, Uncle Jack and Uncle Roland. Uncle Jack was a character and I’m not sure how that man never got arrested with all the things he pulled. Uncle Roland was an avid Dallas Cowboys fan and was a welder who learned his trade repairing battle ships in Hawaii during WWII. Uncle Leon…. I think something must have happened to him during the war because the man simply was not bashful about anything. He was a large man, about 6’3” and as close to 400 lbs. as a man could get without actually being 400 lbs. Maybe the most notable traits about him were his gentle demeanor, a love of plow-broke mules and overalls, the only form of clothing he wore out of the house. He also had an uncanny ability to rid the chicken house of coyotes with a .30-30 no matter what time of night it was. Shimson's Hopkins Natural straight grain Uncle Jack would smoke a pipe from time to time, but he had passed away by the time I was 7 or 8 years old. I don’t recall what sort of pipes he smoked, but I do remember his ridiculous one liners and songs he would come up with on the fly just to make us laugh. He was a truly funny man, the type that would have told a dirty joke to the Pope. Uncle Vanoy was the big pipe smoker. He was a pilot during the WWII, which profession allowed him to move to Ohio in the 1950’s. We called him “Yank,” and he had a love of Danish Freehands and Jack Daniels. I recall he would smoke Prince Albert, Walter Raleigh and on occasion a cherry cavendish of uncertain provenance. I always remembered being on the front porch when he smoked and I loved the smell. Everyone did. My father would tell me about spending the better part of a day carting Uncle Vanoy around Dallas trying to find him a new pipe back in the mid-70’s. Dallas is known for many things but pipe shops aren’t one of them. “We spent the whole day looking for one of them ugly-ass pipes he…