Born in the gutter
-That's how we got cigarettes
By Encyclopaedia Britannica-
UPI
Ever stop to think who invented the cigarette, and why?
Cigarettes were born in the gutter and popularized in a war. It all began when Spanish explorers caught the Aztecs smoking tobacco stuffed into hollow reeds.
Some natives rolled crushed tobacco leaves in corn husks. But these smokes were ignored by the Spaniards, who took home something else the natives were smoking—cigars.
Soon wealthy Spaniards were puffing contentedly and tossing the butts into the gutters. And that's where the cigarette as it is
known today was invented. Those discarded cigar butts, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, were turned into the first paper wrapped cigarettes, by the enterprising beggars of Seville, early in the 16th century. They salvaged the butts, shredded them and rolled scraps of paper around the tobacco.
Those poor man's smokes were known as papeletes or cigarillos. It was nearly 200 years before they acquired respectability. Traders carried them to other continents, but as was to be the case in later years, their popularity was stimulated more by warfare.
The new smokes became familiar to French and British soldiers fighting each other on Spanish soil during the Napoleonic campaign of 1814. They took their newly discovered pleasure home with them. It was in France that they acquired the name cigarettes.
In a few years the cigarette crossed the Atlantic. In 1854, R. T. Traill, a commentator on the New York social scene, complained that fashionable women had started smoking cigarettes "aping the silly ways of some pseudo-accomplished foreigners."
Cigarette production in the United States was entirely dependent on hand labor until the
1880s when machines were perfected that turned out thousands of cigarettes per hour and reduced the cost by nearly two-thirds.
Cigarette production jumped from 500 million in 1880 to 1 billion in 1885 and 4 billion in 1920, when cigarettes caught up with them. Cigarette popularity in the 15 year period that included World War 1 shot up 600 per cent. That rate more than doubled during and after World War II.
Part of this increase was triggered by the revolution in manners which freed American
women of all ages to take up smoking. In 1920 no cigarette advertiser would portray a woman smoking. When the decade closed, the ads had women and the women had cigarettes.
The publication of research reports linking cigarettes with cancer brought a decline to cigarette sales. Some of the sales dips were erased by the population spiral that produced increasing numbers of new smokers but this spring the Internal Revenue Service announced that the number of taxed cigarettes produced in 1969 totaled 523 billion, a decline of 2.4 billion from the year before.
80th Year, No.13
The University of Kansas—Lawrence, Kansas
Tuesday, July 21, 1970
Occasional firebombings and gun shots punctuated four consecutive nights of sporadic disturbances stemming from the fatal shooting Thursday night of a 19-year-old black youth by a Lawrence policeman.
Donald Rick Dowdell, a freshman at KU last year, was shot by patrolman William Garrett after a brief car chase. Garrett said Dowdell fired at officers after a warning shot had been fired over his head.
Dowdell and a female companion, Franki Cole, KU freshman, were pursued by police after leaving the Afro House, 946 Rhode Island St., where they allegedly went after a shooting incident in the predominantly black area of east Lawrence.
A .357 magnum single-action Blackhawk pistol found near Dowdell's body is undergoing tests.
The death sparked a series of firebombings, snipings and other violence, in which a Eudora patrolman was injured.
Eugene Williams, 48, was shot in the lower chest with a small caliber bullet from a snipers gun Friday. He remains in fair condition in Lawrence Memorial Hospital.
Several police cars were struck by bullets and shotgun blasts
Scranton would muzzle Agnew
WASHINGTON (UPI) — William W. Scranton, chairman of the campus unrest commission, said recently the commission would not hesitate to recommend that President Nixon end the Vietnam War and silence the Vice-President if it felt either action would bring campus peace this fall.
"Certainly, I think it is within our purview and our right, if we think action to end the war would alleviate campus unrest, we should and we would recommend that," the former Republican Governor of Pennsylvania said at a news conference.
But he added, "there are other matters than campus unrest that would enter into the President's determination to end the war."
Scranton was asked whether the commission would recommend that President Nixon "tell Agnew to lower his voice" since many of the commission's first witnesses have criticized the vice-president's comments.
"Do I think this would be in order as a recommendation if we
Friday night. One car was put out of commission after its rear window and the windows on one side were completely shattered by shotgun pellets.
wanted to recommend it?" Scran-
ton answered, "Yes."
Scranton joined two other commissioners at the news conference in criticizing testimony of Maj. Gen. Winston P. Wilson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, for being less than direct in his answers when he appeared Friday the third day of commission hearings.
"Frankly though," he continued, "I don't think that until the commission finishes its work I should go around telling people how to act."
"There has been a reluctance to level with the commission, a defensiveness on the part of those in bureaucratic offices. They have been vague and almost shifty to the point where questions are not answered at all," he said.
Commissioner James Ahern, police chief of New Haven, Conn., was more specific. He said he thought the "least worthwhile" testimony thus far had come from those in "officialdom."
Other police cars were damaged by rocks and bricks hurled at officers when they accompanied firemen to the area of Lawrence north of the KU campus, popularly known as hippie haven.
Arsonists struck at least three times at the house on 1225 Oread, the scene of repeated firebombings during previous disturbances on the KU campus during April and May. Firemen answering a call at the address early Saturday morning found fires set on all four floors of the building.
Two men were arrested on charges of aggravated assault in the area of the Rock Chalk Cafe Sunday night. Richard C. Baird, 20, of Lawrence is being held in Douglas County Jail on $5,000 bond. Mitchell F. Dever, 20, is absent without leave from the military, and will be turned over to federal authorities.
Four arrests were made Saturday night, three for carrying concealed weapons and one for possession of marijuana.
A group of about 60 citizens, mostly black, presented a petition demanding the immediate suspension of the patrolman who shot Dowdell to City Manager Buford Watson Friday. The petition, bearing the signatures of about 75 members of the black community, asked the suspension "on the grounds of the circumstances surrounding the death of Donald Rick Dowdell on the evening of July 16, 1970."
The house, known as the White House and the River City Club House, has been purchased by the University and is to be torn down in the near future.
Officers used tear gas to disperse a rock-throwing crowd Saturday and Sunday nights after trash fires were set in the street and a utility pole set ablaze.
The petition further requested a "thorough and objective investigation into the events leading to the shooting of person or persons in the premises of the Afro House on the above mentioned evening."
A larger group marched to the residence of Chancellor E. Laurence Chalmers Jr. Friday night where one person broke a window with a hurled rock.
Fire bombs were also hurled at the home of District Court Judge Frank Gray. Only one of the two devices thrown caught fire, and damage to the roof and siding of the home was slight.
Earlier fires were reported Thursday night and early Friday morning at Lawrence Launderers and Dry Cleaners, 938 New Hampshire St., and Santee Apartments, 1127 Indiana St. Both buildings received minor damage.
Businesses in the east Lawrence area also reported some damage from snipers' bullets.
City officials ruled out precautionary measures other than local police manpower during the disturbances, although units of the Kansas Highway Patrol were placed on alert.
Funeral services for Dowdell have tentatively been set for Thursday. Topeka attorney Charles Scott has been retained by the youth's father to investigate the possibility of an inquest into the death.
Miss Cole, the only witness to the shooting other than Garrett and another patrolman, will be represented by David Culp, assistant professor of law at KU. She has released no statement.
Stark solitude
LIGHT and shadow—black and white—the warmth of a human body and the cold steel of a bridge. Life is made of a series of opposites, sometimes blended into one only by the blind lens of a camera.