Place was smokin’
As Washington voters head to the polls to vote on a new antismoking initiative which would further snuff out smoking in public places, it’s instructive to learn just how ingrained tobacco has been in the early history of Spokane.
Consider this statistic: In 1910, the Spokane City Directory listed 122 cigar shops.
That’s right, 122. A stroll along Sprague Avenue alone would have taken you past 16 cigar shops, including P.M. Jacoy, Tobacco, established in 1903 by Pete Jacoy.
The directory also listed 16 cigar manufacturers in Spokane. Nobody ever considered Spokane a particular cigar-manufacturing center, but in those days, tobacco from Cuba, Virginia and elsewhere was sent to small factories in cities all over the country where cigars were assembled for local consumption.
The cigar stores themselves were not just places to buy cigars. They were like informal men’s clubs and some of them doubled as gambling joints. The Spokesman-Review complained in 1903 that, even though gambling had been made a felony earlier that year, “the saloons and cigar stores will not take out the slot machines.”
In 1905, many cigar stores had permanent card games running in the back room, although this was not confined to cigar stores. Saloons and barber shops also had card games in the back.
When saloons were banned statewide in 1914, cigar stores filled the void. Men had to gather somewhere, didn’t they? When Prohibition arrived in 1920, plenty of cigar stores added a new service: illicit booze.
Meanwhile, the cigar itself had been slowly losing popularity to a controversial new fad: the cigarette.
In 1905, The Spokesman-Review ran a story which attempted to answer the burning question: Are cigarettes better for your health than cigars and pipes?
“I do not see why cigarette smoking should be more detrimental to health, if good paper and good tobacco is used,” said Dr. John Semple, local alienist (psychiatrist).
He also added, “As (former) superintendent of the Medical Lake insane asylum, I never could find any relation between cigarette smoking and insanity.”
However, several other Spokane doctors came down strongly against cigarettes. Dr. C.G. Brown said that he believed “it is the paper in them that makes them injurious.”
Dr. W.F. Potter added that “tobacco is in no sense a disinfectant, as many people believe it to be.”
County coroner Dr. F.B. Witter said, “Any man who smokes cigarettes is a fool. He needs someone to follow him around and take care of him. The only safe and sensible kind of smoke is a long-stemmed pipe.”
Nevertheless, the cigarette slowly began to replace the cigar as a fashionable smoke, and by the Roaring ‘20s, the cigarette was firmly established. Cigar shops sold cigarettes as well, so it probably didn’t appear to be a particular problem.
Still, the number of cigar shops in Spokane slowly declined through the rest of the century, in part because cigarettes could be mass-marketed in grocery stores and other retail outlets. Cigarettes required no big display cases, no humidors – and no room in the back with a poker table.
So today, one of the few vestiges of the city’s rich cigar-store heritage can still be found on the northwest corner of Sprague and Washington: P.M. Jacoy’s. It is now essentially a convenience story, selling magazines, food and beverages.
Yet you can still walk in, just as you could 100 years ago, and buy yourself a quality smoke.