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At a writing workshop for inner-city high school teachers, I asked my students to write a description of their childhood homes. The dominant heritage in this group was Italian, many first- and second-generation. When it came time to read their descriptions aloud, nearly every one of the Italian descendants had written about the lush, humid atmosphere of dinnertime in a tenement apartment, of an aproned mother laboring over a pot of what we call tomato sauce and she called gravy. Some of them had to read through tears of remembrance, others recalled telling details that unleashed gasps of recognition. "Oh my God! My mother used to threaten me with the wooden spoon, too!"
The discussion drifted and one teacher mentioned that she has been giving a similar assignment-to write about food-for more than 20 years and she's noticed that the kids have less and less to say. "This has always been a school full of recent immigrants, and they used to write about stuff like plaintain and beans," she said. "But in recent years, they look at me oddly when I give the assignment and ask, 'You want us to write about pizza?'"
What will be the smells that instantly transport future generations back to their childhoods? I worry that it'll be the fumes from plastic packaging, or air fresheners, or french fries in a greasy sack. I must be getting old.
What got my nose itching was the sad news that my old home town's sixty-year-old newsstand/tobacco shop, Kenny's News Agency in Doylestown, was closing its doors forever. Kenny's was old school right to the end, proudly selling tobacco in all its forms along with paraphernalia from pipe cleaners to lighter flints. Kenny's also sold candy, stacks of local, and national newspapers, all the popular magazines, and a few books. It was in the middle of town, an institution with generations of patrons. In recent years it became a busy gathering spot for teenagers, where they could buy candy and get an older friend to buy them cigarettes.
The place had not been redecorated in years, if ever, and it was owned by the daughter of the original owner, Joe Kenny. It was her death that precipitated the decision to close. Barbara smoked cigarettes and so did her staff. The place was redolent with the dusty, earthy smell of fresh and consumed tobacco, mingled with the oily scent of ink drying on newsprint-a smell so intoxicating to me that every time I entered I flew back for an instant to the brightest days of my childhood. Kenny's gave me an emotional buzz.
I first left my old home town in the late 1960s, when I was 19 years old. I was glad to go, having gotten my feet wet in journalism at the local paper and eager to conquer the rest of the world. Doylestown was no place for a young person in those days. The town had languished for years. Many of its most-striking buildings and homes had fallen into disrepair, and the crowd, if there ever was one, had moved on to the newest thing-shopping malls. There was nothing to do and the business district was shuttered by 5 o'clock each afternoon, 3 o'clock on Saturday.
Kenny's had been my portal to the world. For all the years of my childhood I went there with my father to buy his newspapers-the New York Times and Wall Street Journal-and the cartons of L&M cigarettes my mother chain-smoked. I acquired my love of newspapers and magazines at Kenny's, and cemented a fascination with tobacco.
Kenny's was where, the day after President Kennedy was murdered, I bought a copy of The New York Times that I still have stored somewhere in a box. Kenny's was where I would get a secret thrill looking at all those brightly-colored packages of cigarettes, yearning to try them all out.
Cigarettes were an integral part of our family's culture. Nearly all my relatives smoked. Our coffee and end tables gleamed with heavy, filigreed, silver lighters with felted bottoms to keep from scratching the furniture. They gave off a luxurious bouquet of lighter fluid. There were engraved cigarette boxes lined with cedar-wedding gifts to my parents-and a wood-handled silent butler, shaped like a little fry pan with a lid, to carry away the ashes. When I was bored I'd make my way around the living room playing with the lighters, clapping the lid of the silent butler, and poking my nose in the boxes to suck up a whiff of cured tobacco mingled with an astringent note of cedar. Pure heaven.
There were other smells that mattered to me. I spent the first six years of my life on a dairy farm, so I am a connoisseur of the scent of cow manure. Nothing evokes such a bittersweet feeling of love and loss as a warm summer breeze wafting through a barn at milking time. The combined odors of the musty hay and loamy manure trigger instant euphoria, a deep sense of being where I belong. A field of freshly-mown timothy is another trigger, as is sour milk, a penetrating and persistent odor on a dairy farm. Rather than decay, it speaks to me of freshness and abundance.
My parents, transplanted urbanites who thought it would be fun to run a dairy herd in Bucks County, ended up losing the farm when the bottom dropped out of milk prices. We moved to suburbia. I was lucky. I never got old enough to smell cow shit and think about having to shovel it, freshly-mown hay and think about having to bail it, or sour milk and think about needing to get the cans into the cooler before it turned.
A few years later, my father went into the tobacco business. He imported pipes and sold them, along with tobacco and foreign cigarettes, to smoke shops and newsstands around the country. He carried pipe racks, wooden humidors for keeping tobacco fresh, scraping tools, pipe cleaners, tobacco pouches, cigar cutters, and a hundred other items essential to the aficionado. I worked with him for a couple of years, bathed in a medley of dark, masculine, organic smells: a hundred or more blends and flavors of tobacco, cigars and cigarettes from all over the world, wood, and leather.
Kenny's was one of my father's customers, and he'd often try out a new item there before deciding whether to offer it nationally. So it all came together for me at Kenny's, infusing my young mind with an air of sophistication-tobacco-and the promise of knowledge-newspapers.
I left Doylestown again in 1974 and lived anywhere but here for two decades. In the meantime fitted clothing, jogging, and healthier foods became popular and the link between smoking and cancer became clear. Pipe smoking died a slow and pathetic death as smoke shops across the country were driven out of business by the malls and evolving culture. My father panicked, and then did nothing. His business withered until one day he just sold off the display cases and locked the doors.
After a long stretch living in New York, I returned to the area in 1994. On my first visit back to Doylestown, I walked into Kenny's after an absence of two decades. The smell enveloped me in a long-remembered embrace. Home. Family. Career. In the ten years since I came back, I must have crossed the threshold at Kenny's a thousand times, and a thousand times I greedily inhaled that memory trigger.
Now Kenny's is gone, along with the dairy farms that once dominated the Bucks County landscape, the butcher, the Rexall drug store on the square where they made cherry cokes from scratch, and all the rest of the authentic sensory venues of my youth. The passing of Kenny's reminds me that we live in a world that is increasingly sterile, homogenized, and climate controlled. Tobacco is no longer sophisticated-a good thing, of course-and people get their news on television and the internet-a real convenience.
But I wonder what sort of world we will leave our children when it is devoid of the authentic smells of printer's ink, hay, or a pot of tomato sauce bubbling on the stove.
by Foster Winans
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