System Pipes

"Crom and devils! Take the girl, but you can't have my System GIANT!" Mitra! A Peterson GIANT from the dawn of time. Who will rescue it from destruction by the evil-smelling, axe-wielding, No Smoking Big Uglies? Our favorite swash-buckling Cimmerian, that's who! Somewhere recently I remember reading Glen Whelan talking about the “fire hole” of a pipe. If you don’t know what that is, you’re probably not alone even as a Pete Geek. I hadn’t heard that term since I was at the factory in 2013, when Glen’s Dad Tony Whelan Jr. (factory manager at the time) used it in referring to what the non-Pete world calls a pipe’s tobacco chamber.  But fire hole is much, much better, don’t you think? A couple of weeks ago Jonathan Gut CPG sent photos of a System so spectacular that words failed me.  While Gary Hamilton was able to respond with enthusiasm, but words failed me and I couldn't answer. It was the size, of course.  I'd seen two of these pipes before, but nothing to compare with this one.  The absolute mass of birdseye dazzled my brain and the room began to swirl around.  Then darkness swallowed me up. I think I fainted. When I recovered consciousness and stumbled up from the mat about a week later, I wrote Jonathan to ask him about it. If I understood him, Jonathan’s adding a new wing on his house to accommodate it.  That’s because  a System GIANT can't be housed just anywhere.  There are security measures that have to be taken.  Bars to be installed on windows.  A new identity to be assumed. And of course, there are space considerations. And I said "System GIANT"--that's because  we need to add new vocabulary to the Pete Speak Lexicon. Here’s my first-draft definition:  System GIANT: What others call a magnum, Pete Geeks call either a “Giant” (for non-System pipes) or a “System GIANT.” The System Giant is substantially larger than the “O” (Oversize) shapes of the 1896 and 1906 catalogs.  Examples have been documented in the Patent, IFS, and Republic eras. There are three reasons System GIANT is a better term than magnum to describe this largest-of-the-large Petes: First, like I’ve already said, it’s a word K&P made their own when they named the straight and bent billiards “Giants” in the ephemera from 1976.  These two shapes were made earlier, but this was the first time they were named. The Connemara Giant by Irish sculptor Mark Joyce Second, I am convinced K&P called those two pipes GIANTS instead of magnums because Ireland has a rich heritage of legends and myths containing giants: the Fomorians, Ireland’s first giants and associated with Giant's Causeway, including Finn McCool and Gráinne his betrothed, but there's also Dryantore and many, many more, as I. E. Kneverday’s blog and books have noted. Third, magnum is Latin for “great.”  Latin is great for things like oversize bottles of wine and Dirty Harry’s gun, but for the largest of all Irish Petersons, it seems…