Runyon on attitudes toward smoking.

The uses to which his writing skills have been harnessed sometimes have been highly annoying, but nonetheless, Keith Runyon always could write quite well, as he does here. The tobacco-free move by CVS functions as mere aperitif to Runyon's recollections of what it meant to exist in tobacco-pervasive society.

The Changing Attitudes Toward Smoking in Louisville and Beyond, by Keith Runyon (WFPL)

The announcement Wednesday by CVS pharmacies that, as of Oct. 1, they will no longer sell cigarettes in their 7,600 locations is another step in the long march that began 50 years ago this winter, when the Surgeon General’s Report on tobacco and cancer was first issued. (CVS operates 14 stores in Louisville, and is preparing to open a new one on the first floor of the old Stewart’s Dry Goods building at Fourth and Muhammad Ali.)

I've never smoked cigarettes, and have vastly reduced my cigar consumption. Given that the Public House went smoke-free only in 2010, and I was away from that building much of the preceding year in the run-up to Bank Street Brewhouse, this places me at five years smoke-free in the sense to breathing the second-hand smoke all those preceding barroom decades.

Even if he had not smoked, we kids were exposed to it everywhere else, including (and particularly) in the restrooms of public schools, where young teenagers of my era were slipping away to puff away between classes, at lunchtime and after school. Of course it was against the rules. But despite occasional “busts” the school administrators generally looked the other way. And why not? Most of them puffed away in the teachers’ lounges.