“Do I think this is a growing hobby? I’m hesitant to say that. But it is also a young man’s pastime,” says Marty Pulvers, 76, of Los Altos, California, who is co-producer of the annual West Coast Pipe Show based in Las Vegas. “Pipe smoking is seen as an old man’s pastime. Hoffman estimates that about 35 percent of his customers now are between the ages of 20 and 30, as opposed to 5 to 10 percent a decade ago. Greg Vickers, 60, membership-services manager of the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association in Washington, D.C., says only, “I hear word-of-mouth from our pipe members that younger folk are coming in.” George Hoffman, 67, owner of Pipes by George in Raleigh, North Carolina, tells me that, unlike the cigar boom, pipe smoking has “been more gradual” to catch on. However, testimonials do not equal trend lines. Paul, Minnesota, who picked up the hobby at age 16 after seeing hobbits enjoying pipes in “The Lord of the Rings” films. “I used to sit in traffic for several hours a day commuting, and it would help me calm down,” says Tyler Thomas, a 23-year-old sound engineer in St. Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck (played by Dominic Monaghan) is a hobbit that takes pleasure in pipe smoking in “The Lord of the Rings” film trilogy, which debuted between 20. Nearly five years later, it’s largely agreed that pipe smoking’s youthquake hasn’t saved the industry or the hobby, either, but it has changed how pipe smoking appears in our minds: It’s unlikely that the image of an American smoking a pipe will be only associated with the dark-wooded dens of men in retirement ever again. In 2014, ABC News postulated that younger smokers and collectors were bringing pipe smoking, a hobby reminiscent of great-uncles and blazered villains of ’80s teen comedies, back into fashion. Unlike napkins, diamonds, and golfing-traditions that Millennials have supposedly “killed”-pipe smoking is very much alive. Instead, I try to stop time, if only for a few moments, during what a fellow pipe smoker 10 years my junior called “the productive work of turning leaves into ash.” When I light up, I can’t ache with a memory I never had of my grandfather smoking those pipes. Long gone, I only remember my grandfather’s pipes as bent-wood statues, silent in a cherry rack on his desk. But you are talking about an object that, when well-made, can last a hundred years.” “A pipe fundamentally is piece of wood with a hole and a mouthpiece stuck in it. It would be three more years before a chance meeting with a friend at his favorite tobacco shop turned me, a few weeks after my 35th birthday, into a pipe smoker. When he passed away, my family donated his pipes, thinking no one wanted them-which at the time was true. My mother didn’t like him smoking around us kids, and he respected that. ![]() (Photo by Mary Walters of Walters Photography) Kaz Walters, a 28-year-old pipe specialist at, and his wife, 25-year-old pipe photographer Mary Walters, are among the Millennials who’ve embraced the hobby.
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