LITTLE ROCK — The last sentence of Herbert Bruhn's recent letter to the editor stopped me cold.
Mr. Bruhn, formerly of Omaha, Neb., and a 28-year denizen of Dover, wrote that in 1981 he quit smoking cold turkey, a feat both noteworthy and rare.
That achievement alone, however, wasn't the eyecatcher.
When Mr. Bruhn quit after double-bypass surgery, he was sucking down three packs of cigarettes a day. Three packs, for Smokey Bear's sake!
Assuming Mr. Bruhn slept eight hours a night, that would mean he smoked three and three-fourths cigarettes per hour.
"That's one every 15 minutes or so," Mr. Bruhn told me by telephone when I called to express my amazement. "A cigarette probably lasted me seven or eight minutes before it got too short to smoke. As soon as you put it out, wasn't but a few minutes you lit another one.
"That was at the peak of my career as a smoker."
Mr. Bruhn, son of a heavy smoker, started his career as a kid on the streets of Omaha, where he and his 13-hear-old buddies learned that that trolley stop in front of the military theater was the richest spot for scavenging snipes, which is what they called the cigarette butts in those days.
"There were two car lines going into downtown Omaha," says Mr. Bruhn, who was born Oct. 7, 1921. "People would light a cigarette, and bingo; there'd come a street car. They had to put it out.
There was no smoking on the trolley. No spitting either. It's amazing that we never caught an infectious disease smoking behind other people."
He doesn't remember the first time he smoked a cigarette: "Around 1934, 1935.
I've crushed out too many butts since then."
He has seen a lot of ports since then too. At 19, he was broke in Los Angeles - "No job, no money, no place to sleep, no groceries in my belly" - when a man befriended him, starting with a Camel cigarette.
The man bought him a blue plate at the Globe Cafe, invited him to his apartment on Hope Street, and gave him trolley fare to the bowling alley at Whittier and Atlantic, where Mr. Bruhn had stashed his suitcase in the alley.
Eventually, the man talked Mr. Bruhn into joining the Merchant Marine.
After World War II, he worked at a refinery in Texas City, Texas, a job that somewhat limited his career, obvious reasons, as a smoker.
Eventually, he worked for insurance companies inspecting boilers, machinery, pressure vessels and electrical switching gear, a job that allowed plenty of time for cigarettes.
But then, in 1981, he and his wife were in Omaha to visit his father, and there he had his heart attack and the double bypass.
The general practitioner told him to quit smoking. The cardiovascular surgeon told him to quit.
"And a heck of a good looking nurse ... told me to quit. I gave up my cigarettes and never picked them up afterwards."
That was 28 years ago.
"I never miss them. I don't miss them now. It was a case of willpower. That's the way it was going to be."
And if a young person asked him about pursuing a career as a smoker, he said he would say, "You're a fool." But he slipped a four-letter adjective in front of the four letter fool.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 08/25/2009