Corporations: Cigars & Pipe Dreams

To millions of smokers the world over, the name Dunhill conjures up visions of prized pipes, savory Havanas and the carriage-trade atmosphere of a London tobacconist. Actually, Dunhill International, Inc., sells smoking supplies almost as a sideline, is based in Ohio and is run from Houston by an owlish executive who began life as a North Dakota farm boy. Says Chairman Reuben Askanase: “We want to reach customers from the cradle to the tomb.” Dunhill nearly succeeds. Beyond its shops from Manhattan to San Francisco, it is a diversified company whose interests range from baby-bottle nipples and baseballs to railroading and book publishing. Right now, its tobacco business is enjoying a puff because of the Surgeon General’s report on smoking, which condemned cigarettes but gave a reasonably clean bill of health to pipes and cigars.

Bigger Than It Seems. Dunhill’s Askanase, 55, smoked only corncobs down on the farm, but traded up to $25 Corsican briars as a Brooklyn department store executive. By 1945, he had saved enough to buy Houston’s Columbia Dry Goods store, and soon after he led a group in buying Ohio’s Pyramid Rubber Co., whose “Evenflo” nipples and baby bottles have become the nation’s biggest sellers. Pyramiding that company, Askanase built up other industrial holdings and, in 1962, merged with Dunhill, a separate U.S. company that has a long-term marketing agreement with London’s original Alfred Dunhill, Ltd. (the U.S. firm holds 5% of the London company’s stock, markets its British-made pipes and tobaccos in the U.S.).

With its dozen divisions and subsidiaries, including Brooklyn’s New York Dock Railway and the Platt & Munk children’s-book publishing house, Askanase’s Dunhill now has sales of about $25 million. But the firm is much bigger than that; it is the largest stockholder (46%) in the money-manufacturing American Bank Note Co., also owns 54% of A. G. Spalding, which sold $58.5 million worth of sporting goods last year.

Cuba in Connecticut. The U.S. company is still best known for its tobacco products, particularly the cigars that it procures on its own. In its public humidor rooms, where temperature is carefully kept at 65° and humidity at 73%, the walls are lined with cedar lockers blazoning the names of connoisseurs who keep large private stocks: Milton Berle, David Sarnoff, Laurance Rockefeller, the Duke of Windsor. Some customers store up to 10,000 cigars at a time so as not to run low on Dunhill’s most expensive cigars, the eight-inch $1 brands that are made from 45% Havana leaf and 55% Cuban seed tobacco grown in Connecticut. Though supplies from Cuba have been cut off, Dunhill’s Askanase has found other sources, from Jamaica to the Philippines; besides, he still has enough Havana leaf in Dunhill’s huge Tampa warehouses to make a lot of good cigars for a long, long time.