Page 206 - a-columbia-county-boys-recollections-and-memories-of-columbia-county-florida-(2012)-lenvil-h-dicks

A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

SMOKING: THE BEGINNING AND THE END

It must have been somewhere around 1962, at which time I would have been 33 years old, and this was
during the time that Rodney and I were growing tobacco together.

The machine known as a tobacco picker had just come out, and the name of the machine was rather
misleading, because it did not pick tobacco. It merely provided that the boys who were actually picking
the leaves off the tobacco stalks all had to go the same speed because each man cropping the tobacco
had a seat underneath the steering platform of the machine, and they would pick the tobacco while
seated, and put it in a moving chain which took it up to the top level of the tobacco picking machine
where the girls could string it onto the sticks.

Without going into too much detail as to how a tobacco picker worked, suffice it to say when we would
get to the end of the row, the boys who smoked would all jump off and go lean against the fence and
grab a quick cigarette. This had already been going on about 2 years before the particular incident I am
going to tell about, but we had one colored boy named Willy Allen, who could hardly wait to get his lips
wrapped around a Winston cigarette at the end of a row. One day, while he lit up a cigarette, 1 said
“Willy, let me have one of those cigarettes”. Willy replied by saying (because he had never seen me
smoke) “Mr. Dicks you ainl gonna smoke no cigarette”. Well, I told him to let me have one and a light
to light it with and I would show him that I would smoke a cigarette. And so he did, and so I did, and
this same procedure was duplicated for the next 3 or 4 days.

I finally got a little ashamed of myself for smoking up Willy’s cigarettes, and one afternoon on the way
home 1 stopped and bought him a pack of Winstons, as replacements for the ones I had bummed off of
him, and to prevent myself from continuing to bum cigarettes off of Willy, I bought a pack for myself,
too.

Of course, by the time I finished that pack of cigarettes, I was hooked, and I continued to smoke until
2007. As time went on I became more and more addicted to cigarettes, and finally got to the point where
I was consuming 2 packs per day.

I do not know what date it was, and 1 wish I had remembered, but one night I woke up about 3:00 in the
morning, wanting a cigarette, and I said to myself now, Lenvil, you got it pretty bad when you wake up
in the middle of the night having to have a cigarette. For some reason I went on back to sleep without
the cigarette, but before going to sleep it came to my mind that I had really let cigarettes get the better of
me, and that the next morning when I got up I would not light up immediately, as was my custom by
that time. I decided I would wait until I was in the car on the way to the office to smoke my first
cigarette.

Well, on the way to the office, something told me to wait until I got to the office, sitting at my desk, and
at that time I would smoke my first cigarette. Then, when J got to the office and sat down at my desk, for
some reason I decided to wait until noon to smoke my first cigarette. This pattern kept repeating itself all
day long until by bedtime that night I discovered I had gone an entire day without a cigarette, although I
found myself craving one every minute.

So that night 1 got down on my knees side of the bed and talked to the Lord about this question of
quitting smoking, because I had quit many, many times before, and after 2 or 3 days, or perhaps a week,

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