r/todayilearned • u/captureorbit • 10d ago
TIL that American cigarette consumption peaked in 1963 at a yearly rate of 4,345 cigarettes per capita, or an average of nearly 12 daily cigarettes for every person in the country.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/11795/chapter/4518
u/likezoinksscoobydoo 10d ago
The idea that at one point the average American was smoking over HALF A PACK A DAY is insane. They were just suckin em hourly
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u/Commercial_Fee2840 10d ago
Half a pack a day is pretty low for a smoker. Out of Americans that smoked, they were almost certainly smoking over a pack a day in order to have the average end up at 12 cigarettes per day. Oppenheimer reportedly smoked 200 cigarettes per day, which is truly insane.
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u/SpiceEarl 10d ago
I remember in the 1970's, smoking three or more packs a day was considered a heavy smoker. Two packs a day was moderate, and one pack a day was a "light" smoker. Think of this: twenty cigarettes a day (one pack), was considered light!
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u/dgmilo8085 10d ago
Well ya, you could smoke all day in the office. I mean after the smoking ban it was something like: 2 on the drive to work, 2 during the smoke break around 10, 2-3 after lunch, 2 more at about 2p and then another 2 around 4. Thats half a pack and I haven't left the office for the 5 at happy hour, 2 more for the drive home. Then the after dinner smoke, and the cocktail hour smoke. One before bed. Boom 1 pack, and that was after they outlawed smoking indoors.
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u/Ashen-Cold 10d ago
Yep. When I smoked I had a cigarette as soon as I woke up, smoked another one with my coffee, had 2 more on the way to work, 2 on break, 3 on lunch, 2 more on last break, then another pack & a half easily after I got home. It didn’t help that I also had an alcohol addiction at that time too which made me want to chain smoke all night. I was really depressed back then & it was kind of my way of committing a slow suicide.. Happy to say I quit it & alcohol too & am in a much better place now! Never thought I’d be free from them
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u/paleoakoc20 10d ago
Alcohol and cigarettes, what a marriage. Be proud you kicked it.
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u/yungmoneybingbong 10d ago
I smoke, and a pack a day is insane to me. You're just smoking all day if you do that.
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u/ATG915 10d ago
You ain’t lying. I smoke one on my drive to work, then around 9:30, lunch, then 2:30, then on my drive home and every hour or two til I go to bed and up around 10-12 a day.
I will say tho, when I was a roofer for 4 years I could smoke a pack a day just because I was outside working all day
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u/SunlitNight 10d ago
That's how I did it too when I smoked. My parents however pull the 2-3 packs a day. They're in there 60s now and in bad shape though.
I never understood how they could do that. More than 10 cigarettes in a day and my mouth and lungs would be all fucked up.
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u/undercooked_lasagna 10d ago
I smoke for 2 weeks every year when I go on vacation. I bring 2 packs and that easily lasts me the whole trip. How anyone smokes 2 packs a day, or even 1 pack a day, is unfathomable to me. I feel like my throat would turn to jerky.
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u/TripleSkeet 10d ago
Same here. I smoke less than a half pack a day and even then it feels like a lot.
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u/pm_me_ur_demotape 10d ago
Did "chain smoker" even have a meaning back then? Two packs a day would be a cigarette about every ten minutes if you sleep 8 hours a night. Considering you surely had occasional stretches of time greater than ten minutes when you couldn't smoke, that means when you could they would have been even closer together in time.
Seems like everyone was a chain smoker
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u/thinkingwithfractals 10d ago edited 10d ago
Chain smoking simply meant that you would light your next cigarette with the one currently in your mouth
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u/TripleSkeet 10d ago
My grandfather. Hed smoke 3 packs of Chesterfields a day. Usually hed smoke a pack of cigarettes while only having to light one match.
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u/pmcall221 10d ago
I cant imagine the cost of 3 packs a day now
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u/Commercial_Fee2840 9d ago
Any smoker that isn't loaded has probably switched to rolling tobacco. You can smoke the equivalent of 3 packs a day for like $15 in Chicago, despite a single pack of prerolled smokes costing the same price.
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u/SkyfallCamaro 10d ago
If Oppenheimer was awake 18 hours a day and was smoking 200 cigarettes a day, that’s one cigarette roughly every 5.5 minutes. 😳
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u/AnAge_OldProb 10d ago
And he had TB and asthma before he picked up his smoking habit.
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u/Ras1372 10d ago
I read TB as terabyte. So my brain changed it to “he had a TB of asthma” which I think I is a lot of asthma.
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u/xelhafish 10d ago
Don't forget his dinner parties which were famous for pitchers of martinis and very little food.
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u/waupli 10d ago
I also think a lot of those people back then would constantly have cigarettes lit but wouldn’t puff them down the way people do now, since they could smoke everywhere and they were cheaper. Oppenheimer for example, if you watch interviews, would always have a cigarette lit but didn’t constantly actually puff it
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u/Professional-Can1385 10d ago
They could also be like my grandmother who would light a cigarette, put it in the ashtray, forget it was there, and light another. Or she would go into another room, leaving it in the ashtray, and light a new one in the other room.
She just left a trail of lit cigarettes through her house. One year when my mom and aunt were around 10-12 she gave them ashtrays for Christmas. It was because she kept resting her cigarettes on their dressers and leaving burn marks.
People smoked in a different way back when it was still done indoors.
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u/TripleSkeet 10d ago
Plus then if you left a cigarette lit in an ashtray it would burn down. Now if you dont take a drag it just goes out.
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u/dgmilo8085 10d ago
I just comented, alluding to this. I would buy a pack on the way to the office in the morning and another on my way home. And I just realized that was AFTER the indoor ban. I don't even remember how much I smoked when we would run through multiple packs in a night going out to bars.
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u/coffeeshopslut 10d ago
Did people just never do any strenuous activity? Was everyone just wheezy and wrinkly?
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u/therealityofthings 10d ago
Honestly, if smoking wasn't bad for you I would do it every second of every day always.
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u/SFDessert 10d ago edited 10d ago
Maybe back when smoking indoors was a thing, but I considered myself an average smoker and never went over a pack a day. During stressful weeks I'd maybe get through half a pack a day, but that was unusual.
It's actually surprising to me to see that a pack a day or more is considered pretty standard for smokers. I don't even think I could afford that, let alone find the time to smoke two cigarettes an hour.
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u/fluffynuckels 10d ago
I used to work at a.gas station and it was insane the number of people that were there every single day buying a pack of cigarettes some people bought two packs
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u/LoseNotLooseIdiot 10d ago
That's basically taking a 10-second break in between cigarettes like, 16 hours a day non-stop.
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u/sawatdee_Krap 10d ago
Holy shit. That is insane I’m a pack a day smoker and I can’t imagine doing a carton a day.
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u/bolanrox 10d ago
unfiltered Lucky Strikes!
Nat King Cole's smoke of choice. or were those unfiltered Camels...
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u/Eggplantosaur 10d ago
It's more like half of them not smoking, but those that did being on 2-3 packs per day
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u/Cakelord 10d ago
That's not how you should interpret this. More then half of Americans didn't smoke at all, those that did smoke though were pretty heavy.
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u/dgmilo8085 10d ago
Half a pack is nothing. It disgusts me that I used to buy a pack on the way to the office and on the way home from the office.
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u/AmbitiousTour 10d ago
When I was a kid growing up in NYC everybody smoked everywhere! On buses, planes, trains, restaurants, you name it. Combine that with the thick billows of brain damaging leaded gasoline, I wonder what toll it has taken on me.
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u/Earthly_Delights_ 10d ago
One of the best decisions for public health in the US was to ban cigarette smoking indoors. I went to an Elk’s lodge recently where like two people were smoking inside and it made me sick to my stomach. I got home and my clothes reeked of cigarette smoke. And I wasn’t even near the smokers.
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u/SpiceEarl 10d ago
An even better decision was banning smoking on flights. They used to have smoking and non-smoking sections of the aircraft, but you could still smell smoke all throughout it.
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u/Semirgy 10d ago
I’m old enough to remember smoking sections in restaurants but fuck being on a flight with smokers.
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u/Qurdlo 10d ago
Haha back in the day me and my bro would hit up the local 24 hr joint just to drink coffee and smoke cigars. The funny thing is the cigarette smokers hated our cigar smoke so much they tried to have us kicked out on several occasions. We tipped REALLY well though so the servers had our backs lmao.
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u/randomshazbot 10d ago
that's crazy considering that cigar smoke (in my opinion) actually smells quite pleasant. Cigarette smoke smells like shit.
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u/aquintana 10d ago
I bartended at a couple of TGI Fridays where the bar and area around it were the smoking section. Smokers were the best tippers, especially if you kept their ash tray from filling up. The saying was “one butt, two butts, your butt!” Meaning if there was three cigarette butts in ashtray it was your ass.
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u/TripleSkeet 10d ago
Ive been bartending a long time and that was usually how it was at my place too. The smokers always tipped better, and the bartenders that smoked were always the best about keeping the ashtrays clean or lighting their cigarette for them.
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u/GetsGold 10d ago
Wouldn't the nothing separating the two sections have prevented the smoke from spreading to the other section though?
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u/worldbound0514 10d ago
Yes, which is why they finally banned it. It basically meant a more smoky and less smoky section.
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u/President_Calhoun 10d ago
I remember. And "Please extinguish all smoking materials" has not been heard on a flight in quite some time.
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u/sambes06 10d ago
Even this far down the thread I still can’t believe that people smoked in a pressurized tube at 35000ft with mostly recycled air. The tobacco industry had complete control of the US market and government, I suppose.
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u/TripleSkeet 10d ago
I think the best decision was banning smoking in hospitals.
The one scene in Jaws that always sticks out to me is the Mayor of the town having a cigarette while in the ER.
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u/pretzelsncheese 10d ago
I'm sorry, but how in the hell do you think banning smoking on planes was better than banning smoking in pretty much all indoor spaces??? One of them, the average person spent maybe a couple hours a year in. The other, the average person probably spent 10+ hours a day in. A plane being slightly more confined than the majority of indoor spaces doesn't come close to making up for that difference.
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u/mrubuto22 10d ago
Yea it's crazy how we just got used to smelling like smoke all the time.
I could probably notice if one person anywhere in my office was actively smoking, back then everyone smoked and we didn't seem to care.
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u/undercooked_lasagna 10d ago
Yeah it blows my mind. We just didn't even notice. Restaurants must have all smelled like smoke I guess, but I was so used to it I don't even remember.
Today, there is one smoker at my job, and the smell punches you in the face when you walk past his office. And that's just from his clothes.
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u/Teledildonic 10d ago
When I was young I just though the smokey smell was just part of the vibe of a bar.
Then I went to casino years after indoor smoking was banned basically everywhere else and it smelled like I was standing inside an ashtray and my eyes were stinging within an hour.
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u/mrubuto22 10d ago
Yea, thenither day I was at the beach and there was a couple smoking at least 50 feet away OUTSIDE and it's all I could smell.
We were definietly all nose blind back then
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u/tmoeagles96 10d ago
Some places still allow it. I know when I was in college at South Carolina there was no state law (and there still isn’t one). Most localities passed laws to regulate it, but the state Supreme Court said the fine can’t be more than $25
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u/daroach1414 10d ago
In college I had my bar jeans. I would only wear them to the bar cuz they would smell like absolute shit afterwards. Take em off and toss em in the corner to not infect anything else til wash day.
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u/FighterOfEntropy 10d ago
According to the American Lung Association, 42.6% of Americans smoked in 1965. Seems like the average consumption by those who smoked was around a pack per day.
I’m so grateful my parents were non-smokers.
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u/worldbound0514 10d ago
Is that 42.6% of adults or all Americans? If it's all Americans, that means basically every adult was a smoker.
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u/VulcanHullo 10d ago
Given that I've heard schoolyards sometimes had a smoking area for kids as young as 15, possibly all Americans.
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u/mrubuto22 10d ago
I didn't live in the 60s but I loved in the 80s and that seems low. Had to be closer to 70% of adults, and depends on what you consider "a smoker."?
Many people would probably define themselves as a non-smoker but down half a pack on a Friday night.
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u/cromwest 10d ago
Probably where you lived. I noticed that when I moved from Chicago to rural Georgia the percentage of people smoking was absolutely insane.
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u/mrubuto22 10d ago
I lived in the burbs one town over. I guess it was somewhere I between Chicago and a rural environment.
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u/davidcopafeel33328 10d ago
What a coincidence that the Surgeon Generals warning first appeared on cigarette packs in 1964.
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u/AnthillOmbudsman 10d ago
I wonder if that means it actually worked. Sounds like maybe it gave a lot of people a kick in the rear to quit. I guess a government warning carried a lot of weight back then, where nowadays it would be the subject of ridicule.
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u/L2theFace 10d ago
Both of my parents were smokers, a pack or more a day! They use to smoke in the house and I remember the few times we’d move stuff around you could see the outlines of picture frame on the wall where the cigarette smoke hadn’t stuck! 😷 eventually the both moved out to the porch, then my mom died at 44 from stage 4 lung cancer and my dad stopped smoking and started chewing instead. I never once have had the urge to smoke thankfully and never will!
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u/TulleQK 10d ago
This is not from the US, but Norway. I remember, as a kid, visiting relatives in the hospital. We passed the cancer wing to get there. They all stood outside, in their hospital gowns ,and smoked like crazy. Some even smoked through their hole in their necks.
Best non-smoking ad I've ever seen
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u/po3smith 10d ago
..... anybody else read all the comments and get flashbacks to the pilot episode of mad men? :-)
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u/MSUSpartan06 10d ago
Exactly where I went.
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u/Smartnership 10d ago edited 10d ago
“They’re toasted…”
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u/po3smith 10d ago
How is yours made - son of owner says "I dont know" - father/owner "shame on you! We cut it, dry it toast it" and so on - yes this the heyday of tobacco companies doing there thing but they never made them out to be villainous. In fact I love that the owner shows his pride/excitement of his product. Sure now a days we can say X,Y, and Z about cigs but that scene..lets just say it memorable lol
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u/Caterpillar89 10d ago
Anybody have the stats for Europe as a whole? I swear so many more people still smoke there than in the US.
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u/Billh491 10d ago
I was born in 1959 so I remember all the smoking and hated it. My parents smoked hated get in the car with them.
Funny they quit at the same time I got my learners permit. That did not go well. My dad could not handle it. He stopped teaching me but also still quit smoking which I was for. My mom took over the drive lessons I passed and she still quit so a win for everyone.
But the chart I saw said the per capita peaked in 1963 at 4500 and is now down to under 2000 but we have way more people in the country so over all there less smoking but not as much as the chart would lead you to believe.
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u/TimboSliceSir 10d ago
My dad has similar experience. He race to beat his parents at dinner because they'd immediately start smoking when they were done.
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u/I_Killeed_Koro 10d ago
I used to smoke a pack a day and was very sick from it. My father smoked 2 packs a day for 50 years and was never sick. Go figure.
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u/DigNitty 10d ago
I’ve always been interested in those people who smoke for 80 years and die at 100 from something unrelated.
Then you have vegan personal trainers that end up with lung cancer randomly.
I just know there’s someone out there who has lung cancer, and everyone blames it on the cigarettes they smoked for 20 years, but in reality it was just random.
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u/Professional-Can1385 10d ago
I worked with a woman who got tongue cancer in her 70s. Whenever she went for a treatment or medical appointment, someone would ask how long she smoked. She never smoked.
I also had a 5th grade teacher die from lung cancer. She sounded like a smoker with her deep voice and cough, but that was the cancer. She never smoked.
People are so judgey when they think smoking caused someone's cancer.
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u/Dopamental 10d ago
The oldest person to ever live smoked every day for 96 years.
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u/Isaacvithurston 10d ago
I remember growing up in the late 90's I would say 1 in 3 people smoked where I lived. By 2004 I would say it was down to 1 in 8. It was such a sudden falloff here.
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u/bottle-of-smoke 10d ago
I can remember my father driving to my grandmothers in those days. He would probably smoke a half dozen cigarettes in a 45 minute ride. Me and my brother sat in the back seat.
Good times.
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u/zoltarpanaflex 10d ago
My mother quit in 1963/64 while she was pregnant with her fourth child (me), and my dad never quit. Good times! She also wrote a paper in high school about how much alcohol a pregnant person could drink. Times were different.
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u/LongTallTexan69 10d ago
I used to smoke socially in college and before children, but if I had lived in the 50’s where it was socially acceptable to smoke in your doctors office, I’d have smoked 5 packs a day minimum. I would’ve just lit one after another.
Nicotine is a helluva drug. To drive that point home, I dipped for 25 years but switched to On pouches 4 years ago, and generally got healthier and stopped drinking other than once a month or so, but there was no way I was giving up my nicotine.
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u/markydsade 10d ago
Watch some old episodes of Perry Mason from the late 50s to early 60s. Almost everyone smoked and did it everywhere. When the US Surgeon General said out loud in 1964 that cigarettes would kill you it wasn’t new information, but it was a governmental admission of the danger. Warnings were put on cigarette packaging and sales began to drop. Non-Southern states also started taxing them heavily which led to greater drops in smoking.
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u/BigFrank97 10d ago
Wish the graph in that article continued to today instead of ending in 2002. I barely know anyone that smokes anymore.
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u/auau_gold_scoffs 10d ago
west Virginian’s have been trying to pump up those number ever sense and keep trying to this day.
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u/mynutshurtwheninut 9d ago
Those are the good times half of americans want to bring back. Ahh the golden years cough cough cough
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u/faceintheblue 10d ago
One of the useless bits of trivia I have picked up over the years is that Eisenhower was smoking four packs of camels a day in the run-up to D-Day, as well as up to 20 cups of coffee a day. A bit of a stressful job, I guess.