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Please let me insert a quick unrelated story about Earle. One day when I was 8 or 9 years old, I was sitting with nothing to do on a stool at the front of my dad's cafe in Electra. Earle, sitting on some stool further down the counter, completed his morning cup of coffee and stopped at the front cash register on his way out. Earle leaned over and whispered to me, "Hey, Richard, watch your dad's face when he hears this nickel hit the counter."
I looked intently toward my dad who was preparing breakfasts at the grill. Earle slapped the nickel onto the counter and slid it toward the cash register. Continuing his efforts without pause at the grill, my dad's face changed to big grin. Open mouthed, I looked at Earle who nodded knowingly and said. "See?" Earle walked out the door and this little boy sat there amazed.
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Back to the story at hand.
I learned a lot about sheet metal, hand tools, air conditioning and life from Earle. He was a really great guy.
Often, while I was with Earle, he had to stop working and cough; he coughed, gagged, spit, lit another cigarette and went back to work. But, regardless of the coughing interruptions, he was always at work when I arrived in the morning, and, I could tell that he had worked many hours since I left his shop the evening before. Earle feared not hard work.
One day, Earle told me that, while in his teens, he had a motorcycle accident and went tumbling with his motorcycle down a gravel road ripping gashes in his back, legs, arms and head. He said he was lucky to be alive. He told me that, for years after the accident, his wife Lola would come across bumps on his back, and, using a small knife, would dig out tiny pieces of gravel--souvenirs of his long ago near death experience on a motorcycle.
One day, Earle had an especially bad experience with coughing and had to sit down. He coughed and gagged for minutes. I stopped what I was doing, wondered out loud if I could help and saw tears coming out of his eyes. I asked him if I should go get Lola--their house was right next door to the shop. He shook his head no and said he'd be all right.
After he stopped coughing and had a minute to regain his composure, he lit up another cigarette and told me to sit down. I did. He looked directly at me and said, "Richard, listen to me. Promise me you'll never start smoking."
"I won't," I promised. (What else could I say?)
Then he said, "Richard, if you never start smoking, you'll never have to quit. And, I can't quit."
"Yeah," I muttered not knowing what else to say.
Then he looked at the smoke drifting up from his cigarette, held the smoking white specimen in front of me and said, "They don't call 'em coffin nails and cancer sticks for nothin'."
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The lesson I learned
I kept my promise to Earle, and, probably should have gone back to Electra years later and told him that I had listened to what he said. He would have been happy that I took his advice. And, I probably saved $20,000 over my lifetime by not smoking. Thanks Earle.
The mistake I made
I guess that Earle Jones--a small town businessman, in a small west Texas town, in 1958--was the only person in the world who knew that cigarettes would kill you. And, he told me. If I had just shared that little bit of information with the rest world, billions of people would have stopped smoking, billions of young people would never have started smoking and billions of people all over the world would have lived longer and healthier lives.
So, if you or anyone you know has suffered from smoking related illness during the past fifty years, blame me. In 1958, Earle Jones and I knew that cigarettes killed people. We just should have shared that information with the rest of the world. So, to anyone suffering from smoking-related diseases, it's all my fault and I'm sorry I didn't get the word out.
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