How cigarette companies turned Father’s Day into an advertising opportunity

I could well have been that freckle-faced little boy on the sign handing a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes to his dad.  My father, who had been a high school track and field athlete, started smoking Chesterfield cigarettes as a medical student.

By the time he served in the Army in World War II, he was smoking up to two packs a day. This was a decade before epidemiologists and pathologists confirmed in the 1950s that smoking caused heart disease (see the center’s exhibition “‘Tobacco Heart!’ Smoking and Cardiovascular Health.”) As a result of his ever-present cigarette, he suffered a heart attack in 1953 at age 44 (when I was just 5) and died at age 60.

On the whole, the pharmaceutical industry not only looked the other way when it came to smoking, but at least one company, Merck Sharp and Dohme, encouraged it by sending personally embossed matchbooks to physicians with ads for its new antihypertensive medications, DIURIL (chlorothizaide) and HYDRODIURIL (hydrochlorothiazide). Other companies depicted smoking patients in their ads, recommending medications for the conditions caused by smoking, rather than trying to aid physicians in prevent these diseases by educating the public not to smoke (see the center’s exhibition “Depictions of Smoking in Pharmaceutical Advertising“).

One of my father’s passions was rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and in 1956 as we were watching a game on WOR-TV, he suggested that I use our new Webcor audio tape recorder to save examples of the endless commercials for Lucky Strike cigarettes, one of the team’s sponsors. “One day, no one will believe that sports was used to promote smoking,” he predicted. This was the origin of the Center of the Study of Tobacco and Society.

You can view the Lucky Strike billboard in right field at the Dodgers’ stadium, Ebbets Field, in a video clip from the pregame TV show, “Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang,”  in which Jackie Robinson tosses grounders to a little leaguer. And you can listen to the play-by-play of the final inning of a Dodger game in 1956 in which pitcher Sal Maglie is throwing a no-hitter and Dodger announcer Vin Scully is pitching Lucky Strikes.

Throughout the 20th century and to the present day, millions of fathers have died from heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer due to smoking, even as the tobacco industry denied that their products could even cause a cough. Meanwhile, cigarettes were advertised on billboards in sports stadiums, on displays in stores, on TV and radio until banned from the airwaves in 1971, and then increasingly in newspapers and magazines and at entertainment venues.