Tom's Diary

During the 1977 Christmas tree sales season at WPSBC, several of us stayed there over the weekends to work these fundraising events. 

A cruel snuff hazing, involving spittoons and snuff, victimized one unsuspecting fellow that year. He manned the reception desk in the front hall, to direct customers back to the tree store outside the Instruction Building.  I’m ashamed to say that I orchestrated this prank, because it was probably the nastiest, grossest act I’d ever perpetrated on a fellow student.  I humbly and profusely apologize today to him, for violating his innocent trust of me so egregiously. 

The story was that I’d been filling up this empty 64-ounce Pepsi boss bottle for some weeks with tobacco-laden saliva, mucus, and common-cold discharges.  Indeed, chewing snuff creates extremely gross byproducts, and this is a big reason why I rub snuff no more.  Additionally, several roommates and I shared this communal spittoon.  Even just thinking about that louie-laden communal slop inside that clear glass bottle turns my stomach still today. 

Well, one day, the unsuspecting fellow saw me carrying the spittoon around, and asked what it was.  So in my unbridled, sadistic manner as a sixteen year-old prankster, I explained that it was a bottle of Pepsi Light.  I knew that he loved that brand of soda pop, and with the bottle label still intact, and the contents inside looking as dark brown as real Pepsi does, he suspected not a thing. 

Then, just as I hoped he would, he pleaded for a drink. 

“Sure!” I said with an ear-to-ear grin that he must have mistaken for pleased generosity.  I watched with anxious anticipation as he took the blue, Styrofoam-coated glass bottle, unscrewed the snappy, soft metal lid, and raised the opening to his lips.  I observed bubbles entering the narrow but short and stubbly neck of the bottle, slowly making their way to the bottom, which had now become the top, as he tipped flask up for a drink. These bubbles, created by my own spit as it replaced the air in his mouth as he drank, moved slowly through the thick mess of suspended snuff particles and spittle. 

I honestly didn’t think he’d actually drink the stuff.  It smelled so bad that I was certain that he’d notice the odor long before now.  But he didn’t.  So, shocked at this, all I could do was stand there and watch with a combination of astonishment, horror, and a little bit of pleasure. 

Within a couple torturous seconds, clouds blotted out his gleeful demeanor when he realized that that murky brown fluid was not actually Pepsi Light.  He violently retched and spat back out the contents, throwing the spittoon down on the floor with a metallic-sounding thud.  Surprisingly, the glass bottle did not break.  But I’m sure he broke a few blood-vessels in his now-red face, once he’d realized the extent of my treachery.  His anger erupted as a result. 

“Oh, you damn son-of-a-bitch,” he yelled in his nasally voice after me as I scurried away, down the linoleum-covered, creaky wooden floors. ”If you ever show your face here in the annex again, I’ll get you, you stupid idiot.  I’ll   get  you!” 

Fortunately, he calmed down by the next time I saw him, though he didn’t talk to me for nearly a month. 

The memory of that falling-out, which was completely my fault, plagued me with guilt for some months after, and this punishment changed me.  A heretofore jokester, this particular hoax would become the last one I’d ever play on anyone that I recall. So some good did come from it. It’s just unfortunate that he had to pay such a high price for the lesson I learned. 

Tom Hesley

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I made my first attempt to   quit chewing snuff   in October of 1976, by gradually reducing the hours out of each day that I allowed myself to rub it. Each week, I’d move the earliest daily start time an hour later. 

The first week, I quit chewing snuff before 10:00 AM.  That was pretty easy, since I rarely chewed earlier than that anyway. 

Then, the next week, I moved the start time back to 12:00 PM.  This challenged me a bit more because now, I forbade myself to have any snuff during the morning WPSBC recess that occurred between 10:10 AM and 10:20 AM. 

On some of the weeks, I had to stop subtracting allowed hours, in order to get used to the shorter allowable times that I’d enforced the previous week.  Sometimes, it took a month for the cravings to settle down enough that I could cut out more hours with semi-reasonable comfort. 

After several months of shrinking the window of snuff-chewing hours, I reached the point where I was permitting myself only to rub snuff between the hours of 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM. I remember the home economics teacher, [Elstan] complimenting me on the effort.  Since I had a crush on her anyway, her word meant a lot, for an adult.  Indeed, her encouragement enabled me to get as far as I did. 

I don’t remember though, why I “fell off of the wagon,” and resumed full-time snuff chewing. But I did, and this unfortunate fact would prevent me from again attempting to stop for another seven years.  I may have got going at it again because perhaps once I   weaned   myself down to three hours a day in which I could chew snuff, I arrogantly believed that I had more control over the addiction than I actually did; that it had in fact, become a non addiction.  So I reasoned that I could take a chew here and there during the previously-forbidden hours, because even if the cravings returned, I’d be able to ignore them, or at least, work up to ignoring them in pretty short order. 

Well, things didn’t work out that way.  One chew in the afternoon became two, and then ballooned to three chews in the morning besides.  After but three or four weeks sadly, by February of 1977, I had returned to my usual one-can-per-day snuff chewing levels. 

I would not attempt again to quit chewing tobacco until the fall of 1983. 

Tom Hesley

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11:44 AM: I spent $180 for fifteen flasks of stevia on Friday, to sweeten my daily tea and yogurt for a whole year. I prefer spending extra now to avoid sugar’s poisonous effects, over paying much more later to fight them once they surface and become permanent. After all, the cost of one heart bypass surgery would buy a lifetime supply of stevia for several people (at least). My motto: The earlier we solve a problem, the cheaper the solving of it is.

12:00 PM: I started chewing snuff as a boy to gain peer acceptance. But then, twelve years later, I had to quit, also, to get more acceptance. Ironic, isn’t it?

12:05 PM: Did   [Jack] ever tell you that he and I walked one time from his place to the Ritz diner just north of the Palace?  15.4 miles I believe it was.    What a wonderful Philadelphia memory that was.

Tom Hesley

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Yep, I used to chew snuff, as well as the so-called “side chew” tobacco.  Here are just some of the tid bits I remember regarding that horribly expensive and disgusting habit.

• 1974-04: I started chewing, and kept at it though it sickened me every time I tried it for the first couple weeks.  The first brand I rubbed was Copenhagen.  But that burned my lower lip so much that it became raw quite often.  So eventually, I switched over to Happy Days Mint, Happy Days Raspberry, and then, to Skoal brands. 
• 1974-05: Those of us who did it used to hang out in dorm room 307 at WPSBC, spitting out the windows onto the roof.  When it got too cold to have the windows open, we’d use Pringles Potato Crisps cans as spittoons.  They fit nicely underneath the beds of the day, making them, and our habit, easy to conceal from the house parents; or, so we thought.
• 1974-05: I got caught chewing on the Altoona bus one Friday afternoon.  In those days, the buses had ash compartments, located in the arm rests of each seat. By this time, just over a month after my first chew, I was highly addicted to the brown and moist granules, each about the size of a carpenter ant.  Maybe there were some ants in the snuff cans.  But I was too inexperienced to recognize them if they were there, and too young to care.
• 1974-05: We bought the snuff at various places near WPSBC.  But the usual store we visited was an establishment called  the Briar Bowl, located in lower Oakland, on the south west corner of Oakland and Forbes avenues, right across the street from the Gus Miller news stand. 
• 1974-06 –1974-08: I don’t remember chewing much during this summer.  I don’t know where I would have gotten the money to buy the stuff.  Back then, it cost around $0.27 cents a can.  However, the boys that hung out across the street at the North Side School playground in Bellwood, chewed it as well.  So for this whole summer, they didn’t mind me bumming chews off of them.  I think they were happy to see me hooked, right along side them.
• 1974-09: When my eighth grade year began, I graduated from Pringles cans as spittoons to Pepsi bottle.  The 64-Oz. Boss bottles made of glass, a predecessor to the 2-liter plastic bottles found today, was nice and big, and took at least a few weeks to fill up.  But the drawbacks were that it stunk as far away as the moon when finally emptied.  Plus, as a glass bottle, one had to be careful not to sit it down too hard, as it could, and in fact, did break, especially on the concrete floors found in the WPSBC main building basement as well as in the instruction building.
• 1975-06: My parents learned of my vice.  Mom grumbled over it relentlessly, and Dad took me to the basement sometime in this summer for a man-to-man, heart-to-heart.  He explained how gross it appeared, and smelled, to others, who observed someone chewing.  I didn’t listen though.  I kept it up, for it was cool, and it provided a sort of rite of passage, into the social circles at home and at WPSBC, to which I so wanted to belong.  Perhaps Mom and Dad got this, and perhaps this is why they never, ever grounded me for doing it, and never insisted that I stop.  Occasionally, Mom even sprung for a few cans for me, and so did Dad.  She hated the habit, but liked seeing me gratified more strongly. Dad was a heavy smoker.  So I believe he kept quiet about it so as to avoid falling into the old, do-as-I-say-but-not-as-I-do quagmire.  Plus, being a veteran tobacco user himself, he must have appreciated how strongly the cravings for it, as experienced by someone addicted to it, can be.  So he never said much to me about it after this.
• 1975-08: Throughout this entire summer, a bunch of us chewers hung out across the street at the school playground, including   the now-deceased David Middleton and others.  If not for Dave, I likely would have rubbed far less.  He was quite generous with his stash and back then, I thought of him as a sort of hero because he always provided me my tobacco fixes any time when he was nearby.
• 1975-10: I returned to school late this year, because I had hurt my leg a couple month ago.  But when I finally set foot there to properly start my ninth grade year, I found that several other guys besides [Mentat] and [Tad] had picked up the habit.  So, I now had more in common with more people.  Yep, in these early years, I firmly believe that my interest in tobacco was largely motivated by peer pressure.  Now no one ever made me do it outright.  But they did think me “cooler” after I began rubbing snuff than before.  At this time, fitting in was my number one objective, and I wasn’t nearly as critical then as I am today, over what I had to do to fit in. 
• 1975-11: I discovered side chew; a more coarse-cut, and sweetly flavored tobacco.  They called it    side chew   because guys generally put it between their cheek and gum near the back of the mouth, and so, could “munch” on it with their k9, incisor, and molar teeth.  You literally chewed it, in the side of your mouth.  Favorite brands were Beech Nut, Conwood, Apple Jack, and Union Workman. 
• 1975-11: [First Love] seemed impressed that I had become a snuff-chewer.  She’d been known to play with recreational drugs, and though, by this time therefore, tobacco use she’d probably have considered tame, my habit apparently went far to convince her that I was not so much an innocent little boy anymore.  Tobacco won me a few brownie points with her, to be sure, and in light of this I never cared, until well into the 80s, if a pretty girl saw me spitting the brown and snotty  juice into a transparent bottle.
• 1975-12: Eventually, the houseparents realized what I was doing. Like my biological parents, the house father said nothing, and the house mother complained incessantly about it.  But they did nothing more to force me into abstinence.  They tolerated my addiction.  But whether they did so out of compassion, or because they knew they couldn’t stop me even if they tried, I’ll never know.  They hated the habit, and today, I feel perhaps more strongly against it than they ever did.    Yet they seemed happy to just complain, without taking any stronger action against me.  They did what they could but knew when to stop.
• 1976-01: On weekend trips home from WPSBC, I’d meet up with a neighbor boy from next door, and we’d go into his cold garage and chew out there; even when the thermometer flirted with sub-zero temps, we both still had to have our snuff fix.
• 1976-03: I got braces on my top, front teeth.  Still though, I kept chewing, even though it was impossible to get the little pieces of tobacco out of the hooks and wires without meticulous teeth-brushing. 
• 1976-10: I tried for the first time to stop chewing snuff.  Details  here. 
• 1977-06: The two oldest boys next store were chewing Skoal snuff by this point, and the three of us started a snuff can collection in their garage.  Throughout this and the previous summer, we’d managed to save some two-hundred empty cans, which we stacked into a pyramid.  Later, after we got tired of picking them back up and re-stacking them after someone knocked them down, we actually glued the cans together.  No, we weren’t at all bored. 
• 1977-12: I pulled a nasty trick on a friend involving tobacco.  Details   here.
• 1983-11-01: I tried again to quit.  This time however, I stopped all at once, and for the next two months, I was moody and just plain miserable. 
• 1984-01-15: However I started yet again, once I beganmy college education.  Believing that, though erroneously, the snuff would lower my academic stresses, ignoring the wintergreen smell of Skoal, that long-time “friend” of mine, I could not resist any longer.  Then, I chewed like crazy for the next two years at a rate of one can per day. 
• 1986-01-01: Finally, I quit.  The third time must indeed have been the charm. 
• 1986-04-01: But the craving only lessened somewhat.  To keep it at bay, I kept very busy with my college studies and for a time, began consuming  significant amounts of alcohol as well as food.  In fact, I’d amassed quite a collection of different flavors of schnapps in my apartment at Moorhead.  100-proof peppermint was my favorite, followed by orange, peach, banana, cola, blueberry, lime, and a host of other flavors.  At one point I think I had twenty bottles around and consumed at least two of them per week. 
• 1986-08-01: Finally, I could sense a softening of the tobacco longings.  Ever since I stopped chewing, I’d have these dreams almost every night about sitting around with [Mentat] and [Tad], chewing, like we used to.  At first, I found these night visions pleasant.  But by the late summer of 1986, the same dream took on a malevolent meaning, and became a nightmare.  I’d often awaken with a start, feeling so angry at myself for having come so far down the road to beating this thing, and then having just through all that struggle away by allowing myself to chew again.  After my two foiled attempts to stop, I knew that when it comes to tobacco, there’s no such thing as moderate addiction; I’m either fully addicted to it, or I want nothing to do with it.
• 1987-04: Though I’d quit more than a year earlier, I’d still get occasional longings for snuff.  But fortunately, the worst of the craving was past by this time.

Today, nearly twenty-four years after my last chew, I’m pleased and proud to report that I never crave snuff, or any tobacco products at all.  Good thing too, as I don’t think I could afford the nearly $4.00 per can that it costs nowadays. 

Indeed, my case proves that on can quit snuff  if you have enough perseverance along with a host of other, more healthy passions to distract you, until the psychological yearnings for the tobacco disappear.  They will fade eventually.  But this can  (and in fact for me, did)   take years.

So my best advice to anyone considering using tobacco, would be to   avoid it,   because once you start, statistically speaking, you’ll probably never be able to stop.  Yes, I got lucky and somehow found the strength to quit.  I give thanks to the universe for that good fortune every day. 

But the sad truth is that most folks who start using nicotine thinking that they can stop whenever they want, quickly find themselves ensnared in a surprisingly potent, expensive, and risky addiction.  So before they realize it, they’re stuck, and they never, ever, get away.  So count your blessings and stay away from tobacco, while you are outside its clutches. Don’t do it.  Please.  Find other, more constructive and less harmful ways to gain acceptance from your peers. 

Tom Hesley

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We learned that long-time acquaintance David Middleton died by his own hand today.  Though I’d only talked with him once as an adult, his untimely and self-inflicted demise shocked and saddened me.  Afflicted with epilepsy since birth, Dave probably had social concerns surrounding that, which depressed him enough to take his own life.

Dave and I used to climb the cherry tree in his back yard and play together back in the summers of 1970 and 1971.  I liked him.  But I must confess now that the main reason I spent so much time at his house was to catch glimpses of his sisters, Ellen and Martha.  Ellen unfortunately, also died way too young sometime around then.

He used to give me chews of snuff later on, in the mid 1970s, and we spent many evenings just hanging out together at the playground across North Third Street from my family’s home.

Once he got so mad at me that he chased me around that asphalt-covered school yard, and I ran so hard to escape that I injured my right leg, which required a cast to heal and caused me to miss the first month of 9th grade in the fall of 1975.  Our friendship ended then, and I never spoke with him again until this past summer at sister Christine’s, when he and his wife Barb were visiting. 

We shook hands and it was great seeing him again after so long, although he did seem much more quiet and reserved than I remembered him to be twenty years ago.  I suspected that he might be dealing with deep depression just from talking to him, and I’m sorry that he never found respite from the worries of being different socially. 

Take care, Dave. Though you did not deserve to die like this, I sincerely hope you’re at peace now.  It was nice knowing you.

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 I enjoyed my last chew of snuff right after we got back from the New Years eve celebration at Pulsations.

I stuffed my whole mouth with it in an effort to make myself real sick of it; the theory being that I’d grow so tired and disgusted of it that I wouldn’t want it for at least three days, which would have been long enough for any residual physical addiction to the nocotine to disappear.

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Looking backward from 2009-11-28.

1984-01

• Started college and experienced my first official computer class, CS-7, which taught the Pascal programming language on Digital Equipment’s VAX-11 mini computer, running the VAX VMS operating system.
• Met Paula Eide and we dated, mostly by phone, throughout this winter.
• Withdrew from my first college class, which was History 41.  I had, naively signed up for 15 credits in this term, and found the work load excessive.  This class was the first, but not the last casualty of my ignorance.
• Joined the Visually-Impaired Students Association (VISA) at the university.  Paula Eide was the present.
• Unemployment compensation ran out, and it took several months to start receiving disability payments.  So I was pretty poor this month.
• I resumed the rubbing of snuff after a 2-month hiatus. 

1984-02

• I wrote lots of papers for my  Basic Writing   class throughout this entire term, on a Smith Corona cartridge typewriter.
• [Z] visited me and spent the night.
• I actually enjoyed the math work for the Algebra and Trigonometry class.

1984-04

• Finished my first term of college.  I successfully completed introductions to Sociology, basic writing, computer programming, and college math.
• Started reading talking books on cassette tape for the first time as an adult, prompted by [First Love].
• Paula came for a date / visit, and I fixed us a spaghetti dinner.  I remember her commenting about me giving her such a bit bowl of lettuce: “What?” she said.  “Do you think I’m a rabbit?”
• [First Love] and I fought over the usual stuff — her, not giving me as much of her time (or body) as I desired.

1984-05

• Entered my first Calculus class.  At first, I signed up for the six-week version (in half the time).  But it moved too quickly for me to keep up with the assignments.  So I switched to the full-length version of the course, which covered the same material but took over twice as long. 
• Paula Eide and I stopped associating.  Our relationship had deteriorated into constant bickering and arguing, and her health was heading south as well.

1984-06

• Left Mellon St. for Moorhead.
• Bought the bed with the metal head and foot boards and an open-style spring board — not a box spring.

1984-08

• Successfully completed the introduction to Calculus course in college; I received an A.

1984-09

• Returned to college, full-time again, to finish out my freshman year.
• Entered my first FORTRAN computer language class.
• Ditto for the introduction to music listening / appreciation.
• I experienced dating a black woman for the first time.
• Received a job offer to return to work as the head electronics technician at The University of Pittsburgh.  But since I was already fully challenged by my college coursework, I declined.
• Purchased my first CD player and my first CD. 
• Withdrew from my second class this year, which was a Calculus-based introduction to physics.  I had problems applying the Calculus theory to real-world problems such as are found in physics. 

1984-11

• Enjoyed my first intimate experience with the African American woman I met in September.

1984-12

• Finished my freshman year in college.

Tom Hesley

Looking back from 2009-11-01.

Sometime in the spring of 1974, [Mentat] and [Tad] introduced me to this snuff-chewing habit.  They seemed to enjoy it and I wished to do so as well.  So I asked [Tad] to explain to me how to do it.  His brand of choice was Copenhagen.  He said that you take a pinch of the stuff between your thumb and index finger, and place it inside your lower lip in the front.  I did this, and wow!  It burned!  I mean, it really burned, and my mouth filled instantly with saliva.  I’d often wondered why people carried around empty Pringle’s potato chips cans who rubbed snuff.  Now, I knew.  They used them as spittoons.

Minutes after I took my first chew, I grew very dizzy and sick to my stomach.  I should have stopped it then and there.  But I didn’t, because my friends assured me that this was a normal experience for first-time chewers to have and it would eventually disappear once I got used to the smokeless tobacco in my mouth.  It would take me two weeks of trying it at least once a day to “get used to it.”  Again, I should have listened to my body, which was emphatically telling me not to chew.  But I kept chewing, and yes, I did get used to it, but in the process, acquired a very difficult-to-overcome addiction to tobacco.

It was a disgusting habit.  I’d walk around, spitting into empty pop cans, and even used 2-liter pop bottles.  I could fill one of those up in less than three weeks too.  In electronics and wood shop classes, I’d spit out the door so that by the end of the period, there was this big brown puddle of saliva on the ground outside.  Yuck!  But at thirteen years of age, my sense of decorum was far less refined than it is today.  in other words, I didn’t care how it looked.  Plus, I used to think that I was “getting over” on the house parents and teachers, believing that they never even suspected that I was chewing.  But later, after I quit, my nose became real sensitive to tobacco odors, and as a result, I could smell someone chewing thirty feet away.  Looking back, I now suspect that the house parents could smell me doing it too, though they rarely said anything. 

I would go on to rub snuff for another twelve years before I managed to quit it in 1986.  More on that later.

Tom Hesley

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