Paddy Larrigan

I received a Peterson Centenary 4s (my beloved 309 Dutch Billiard shape) from Mike Glukler of Briar Blues this week. I’d thought about the pipe for a long time, even had it on hold for several months without buying it. But its 0/11 place in the Centenary 4s lineup spoke to me, as did its lovely stain. I already knew it was an “A” bowl from our research on the 1875-1975 Centenary pipes for the book, so I knew there’d be no pits or fills. Some of the Centenary pipes number up into the eighties, so the relative rarity of this one made it even more attractive. It had a few issues: no paperwork, no box, no sock, loose stem. For the price, I could live without the first three, but that mention of a loose stem puzzled me. The size appeared right in Mike’s photos, so how could an army mount DeLuxe System stem be loose? Mike thought it might simply be the wrong stem. I had a hypothesis, but there was only one way to find out for sure, and that was to look at the pipe in person for myself. The Two 4s Mortises The stem wasn’t loose, but, as I thought, the mortise had been widened to close the gap. As you can see in the photograph, someone who paid top dollar for this limited edition (pictured on the left) decided to alter it. While this is an almost inconceivable thought in 2015’s climate of pipe collecting, it would not be so in any decade up to and including the 1980s, when closing the gap was part of the established mythos of Peterson’s space-fitting DeLuxe System stem. In my early days I was extremely fortunate that Ted's, my pipe shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a long-established Peterson dealer, and every time I went in I soaked up a little Peterson lore. It doubtless helped that both Ted and his wife Beth were fiercely proud of their Irish heritage (Beth even winning an all-expenses-paid trip to visit the Peterson factory at one point). As a high-schooler, I always made my way slowly through the examination each case of pipes, saving the Petersons for last, lingering over the Peterson demonstrator set out on display (a pipe split in half to show how the System worked). I can’t say when I heard it or from whom I heard it at Ted’s, but for nearly as long as I’ve smoked a pipe I’ve known about the gap in the DeLuxe System and how it closes over time. My 1979 11s The second Christmas after I was married, my wife (bless her) saved up and bought me a pipe far out of my range, a DeLuxe 11s. In those days a Standard System ran about $33, a DeLuxe a little over a hundred. Where she found the money, I never asked. She was so excited about giving it to me that she simply couldn’t wait for Christmas day, and so Christmas…