My Version of the Outsiders

I can’t remember the first time I smoked. I obviously was trying to be “grown up”. I do remember taking some of my lawn mowing money and buying cigarettes when I was 12 or 13. I also remember buying them from Mr. Lawson’s store, near the Junior High School, for 2 cents apiece.


By the time I entered high school I was an old hand at it, and so were a lot of others. During any given school day, between classes and at lunch time, there were a few dozen people heading for the smoking areas.

Most of them were guys. Occasionally there were a 2 or 3 girls out there, but they were way outnumbered. They also seemed to have their own cigarettes, which was not a trait of some of the guys. There always seemed to be 2 or 3 guys at each smoking break who didn’t have any cigarettes.

I understand the some folks viewed the smokers as “hoodlums”, or at least that was a word I heard bandied about, but there were some good people out there. Wayne McNabb, the best friend I’ve had in my whole life was one of them. He wasn’t a hoodlum. Scott Thornburg was a smoker and was later killed in Vietnam. He wasn’t a hoodlum. Danny Thornburg and Billy Wilson did their time in Vietnam. They weren’t hoodlums. Estes Queener, Jabbo Lynn, Allen McNabb, Steve Knox; each one a good guy, and neither was a hoodlum.

Besides, there were other smokers. You couldn’t be a smoker without bumping into some of the “closet smokers” from time to time. Some of the jocks and the “brainy” kids (I think now they’re called nerds), and even some of the “regular” people, lit one up every now and again. They just didn’t want to be seen outside between classes because it might tarnish their reputation, or in the jocks case, get them kicked off the team.

Later, after I joined the military I learned how to “field strip” a cigarette butt and learn terms like, “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”, but smoking didn’t have the same pleasure it carried in high school. As an adult, you could smoke at your desk or almost anyplace else, so it became an individual thing. On the back balcony of the high school, there was a camaraderie that went along with it.

I actually miss it sometimes. Even the cigarette bums.