Education: Wistfully, the Weed

Astutely aware that the pleasant sinkholes where a man misspends his youth glow with unearthly allure as the green years recede, the proprietors of Leavitt & Peirce, a Cambridge (Mass.) tobacco hall and onetime pool hall, invited 31 old Harvard graduates to psalm their shop’s 75th anniversary. Done up in a handsome volume that is illustrated by snapshots of mustached crewmen, football mastodons of the 1880s, and a sinful tintype of a 19th century Cambridge sybarite puffing a hookah, the sentimental replies set up a blue haze of reminiscence.

Low Bail. Drama Critic Brooks Atkinson (’17), stoutly denies that he was one of the shop’s nicotine-tarnished idlers, admits only that “once or twice a year (not often enough to be recognized) I did drop in to take a free pipeful of Cake Box Mixture from the open box on the counter. I tried to give the impression that, if the sample were to my taste, I would order Cake Box Mixture in bulk.” Epicure Lucius Beebe (’27) shunned cigarettes, which caused users to emerge from Leavitt & Peirce “shamelessly trailing clouds of Sweet Caporal and leering at passing virgins in an abandoned manner.” He favored “Java rat-tail cigars, a contriving of Pain’s fireworks dimensions which burned with a clear blue flame like a fuse and possessed an aroma comparable to that of Cambridgeport city dump.”

If he were to live his Harvard years again, Beebe writes, “I would make certain changes for the better, such as no drinking champagne for breakfast and fewer bad cheques fobbed off on temperamental bootleggers. But they were wonderful years in a wonderful world of Mercer runabouts . . . Upmanns from Leavitt & Peirce and the reasonably low bail conventionally set at Boston’s Precinct Station 16 for Harvard undergraduates.”

Historian Samuel Eliot Morison (’08) discourses on Leavitt & Peirce cigarettes: “There were no cheap brands except Home Runs, Sweet Caps, and Richmond Straight Cut, which young gentlemen did not smoke. Egyptian Deities, which cost 25 cents for 10, were fashionable; but, owing to a rumor that Shevlin, the Yale football captain, collected a royalty on every package we boycotted them.” Acceptable smokes of the day were Turkish Delight, Egyptian Prettiest, Pharaoh’s Daughter (Sweet Caporal still survives).

Lost Innocence. Recollections of Leavitt & Peirce not only are effusive (“At least one tiny island on a fluxing planet has remained the way one likes to remember it”), but like smoke, they drift far from the source. Novelist Walter D. Edmonds (’26) begins with the admission that he broke a filial promise not to smoke until he was 21 when “some Jesuitical character pointed out to me that I was already in my twenty-first year,” rambles on to recall that the resulting fumes possessed a curious musk. “Some mornings I awoke to find as many as ten cats in the room . . . All of them showed signs of having been in battle.”

Confessions of lost innocence are frequent. Writes Book Critic Lewis Gannett (’13): “I was the pure young man from a Western New York minister’s home, who had never smoked more than a corn-silk cigarette, and tried to hold the freshman beer night … to ginger ale. One learned.” Artist Waldo Peirce (’07) admits that “Leavitt & Peirce was probably one of the reasons it took me five years to get a degree, though the B in A.B. didn’t stand for billiards.”

The oldest graduate heard from, Biographer Mark A. DeWolfe Howe (’87), turns to verse:

Narrowly parted from the Yard

A little college long has stood.

No flunkster ever yet was barred

From gaining all he might of good

About a brand of special knowledge

Untaught within the larger college.

And so does Poet Robert Hillyer (’17):

Not all goes up in smoke, here smoke appears

To give stability in changing years.