MUG event

PSAs THE PETE GEEK COFFEE MUG EVENT See end of post for details & ordering What's in YOUR Wheelhouse? (see last post) SYSTEM DAY 2026 is this Thursday, September 3rd. Please join the worldwide Pete Geek community to celebrate this day in history--September 3rd, 1890--when Charles Peterson's 3rd and final patent for the System pipe was approved. What you can do: send a photo of your "wheelhouse" Petes or a selfie with you and same to petegeek1896.org. Receive your Certified Pete Geek certificate or a merit badge for entering.   As we approach System Day, I am really pleased to share the long Peterson pilgrimage of Phil Yearout, or Philip D. Yearout, as he's known professionally.  His articles have appeared in Shooting Sportsman, Sporting Tales, The Doublegun Journal in addition to Sporting Classics.  He's a member of  both The Parker Gun Collectors and the A. H. Fox Collectors and you'll find his articles in their publications as well. I've met so many hunters and fly fishermen through PPN that I imagine his name will be familiar to them (I'm thinking of Lance, Cheyen, and Ken to name but three), and have appended a list of some of his articles and where to find them at the end of this post, so without further adieu-- Eighty Years Lived,  Sixty Years a Pipeman, and my Fifty-plus Year Peterson Journey by Phil Yearout As soon as I was old enough to recognize the finer things I vowed that I would do two things: smoke a pipe and drink Scotch whisky. I don’t recall exactly when that occurred – probably some time in high school. But I was a jock: I played football and ran track (well enough to earn some small college scholarship offers, none of which I acted on), and in those days tobacco and alcohol were no-nos to those of us who took training seriously, so I had to postpone those aspirations. But I always thought those were two of the coolest things you could do. So I didn’t waste any time after I got to college. Those were the days when alcohol was banned in the dorms, so I kept mine in rinsed-out toiletry bottles. I can’t tell you the brand of my first pipe or tobacco. Professors still smoked in their classrooms back then, and pipe smoking was just seen as a part of the “college man” persona. I don’t recall there being a real pipe shop in town, but drug and grocery stores all carried pipes and tobacco, so it wasn’t difficult to acquire decent pipes at reasonable prices, nor to find tobacco, and I think I tried every blend I could find, including one I’d like to forget called Greenbriar, a mentholated pipe tobacco. Yuck! At some point I saw a magazine ad for Flying Dutchman tobacco, and pictured with it was the coolest pipe I’d ever seen. I learned it was a Danish freehand – it had turnings on the stem and a natural-finished rim. That set me…