Gaslight pipe-smoking contest still smoldering
Dan Griffin said he quit smoking a decade ago, but came to the pipe-smoking contest at the Gaslight Festival to compete anyway.
Fellow competitor Jonathan Kempf works at a school, but said he’d rather not say which one so as not to influence the children.
Judy Vetter came to the event to watch her boyfriend — but she hung back because she said she’s allergic to smoke.
So it was at the annual anachronism that is the Gaslight pipe-smoking contest as it got under way Sunday in Jeffersontown with six contestants.
Four younger men joined two old-timers in puffing and eyeing each other’s pipes under the columned portico that shelters Jeffersontown City Hall, each nursing 3.3 grams of tobacco, trying for the longest time on just one light.
Under the watchful eyes of a judge holding a stopwatch, the winner, Coy Howard, 37, coaxed his bowl of burley and vanilla-flavored Virginia tobacco to burn 71 minutes, 30 seconds. He snuffed out Gorden Vogel, age 71, who lasted 70 minutes, 45 seconds.
“I pray for two things,” said Howard, a factory worker from Springfield, Ky. “That mine does not go out and others’ do.”
Only two smokers claimed pipe smoking as a habit they still indulge in with regularity.
Once a fixture of festivals far and wide, pipe-smoking competitions have fallen from favor in recent years.
Souvenir pins from the old days studded the red tobacco pouch on the lap of Griffin, a competitive puffer since 1984.
His collection included pins from pipe-smoking marathons at the Ham Days celebration in Lebanon, Ky.; the Steamboat Days Festival in Jeffersonville, Ind.; and the Kentucky State Fair, which snuffed out the event in 2004.
“Politics,” grumbled Griffin, 67, of Jeffersonville. “It is not as big as it used to be. We used to have 15 contests locally. The season began in March in Springfield and crescendoed until the world championships in October.”
This year, the International Association of Pipe Smokers will hold its 61st world championships near its headquarters in Mount Pleasant, Mich.
The association’s Web site lists Internet links to seven pipe-smoking clubs nationwide, including the Kentuckiana Pipe Smokers Club based at Kremer’s Smoke Shoppe in downtown Louisville.
Before the contest began, the owner of Kremer’s shouted to be heard over the keyboard and drums of a six-man gospel combo playing for festival passers-by on Watterson Trail.
“We used to have 60 or 70 members in our club,” Gayle Sallee said. “Now we only have four or five.”
This was the second year Kempf, 27, who also works as a clerk at a liquor store on Bardstown Road, competed in the pipe-smoking contest with his friend Jordan Humbert, 26, a musician.
“I haven’t smoked a pipe since last year,” Kempf said. “I don’t need another bad habit.”
Nate Keller, 18, said he took up pipe smoking under a tree in his Jeffersontown backyard last year to ease nerves jangled by his job setting bowling pins at King Pin Lanes on Taylorsville Road.
“After you have had a harsh day, it puts you in a mellow mind,” Keller said. “There is not much pipe smoking out there. I like to be a member of a small group.”
Reporter Jere Downs can be reached at (502) 582-4669.
