Smokeless tobacco: The 'snoose' blues

With all the hullabaloo about the smokeless tobacco issue at the Greeley Stampede, I pulled out a piece I wrote about 30 years ago and updated it.

It has been called a disgusting habit, a health risk, an art form, a rite or passage, the work of the devil or a poor man's drug. The use of smokeless tobacco (which will hereafter be called "snoose," which is what my father called it) has waxed and waned over the years. We are talking about that small, sweet-smelling dash of heaven or hell that men (and some women) put in their mouths, under their lip or between the cheek and gum.

There are few of us that were reared in the West who didn't have at least a passing knowledge of snoose. It was like a rite of passage for a boy to stick a thimble full of Copenhagen or Skoal in his mouth and carry on a conversations without throwing up or dribbling a very unbecoming string of brown juice down his chin. There was one absolute given: Don't swallow it.

Some of the measures that we went through in high school to have our daily chew were elaborate, and in retrospect, very clever. We knew we could never get away with it in the classroom because there was no place to spit, and no one, not even my buddy Butch, could hold a mouthful of the stuff for an hour without either swallowing it or drooling onto his desk.

One of the brighter (relative term) guys figured out that if he went into the library and pretended to be reading a book, the teacher who was in charge of the library was so pleased that we were actually reading, she would leave you alone. That was when you could get your hit of snoose. The problem of where to spit was easily solved. First, for the uninitiated, I'd better tell you that once you stuck a wad of snoose in your mouth, you started salivating in a way that would put Pavlov's dog to shame. Rivers of the stuff suddenly became available. As no tender teenage stomach can stand the effects of swallowing the equivalent of battery acid, there had to be a place to spit. This is where teenage American ingenuity came into play. The solution was to simply take a book off the shelf, open it, spit into the book, and then put it back on the shelf where it would likely rest undisturbed for at least the next three months. During this time, everything would dry out and the only evidence would be an ugly brown stain that would be heaviest on pages 104 and 105 but would fade out by pages 100 and 109. If you happened to be chewing a sweetened chew, the pages could be a little hard to get apart.

There developed a protocol for this procedure. Some books were sacrosanct. Nothing by Zane Grey, McKinley Cantor, Jack London or Robert Ruark could be touched. Other books were fair game. Such titles as "Jane Eyre," "Little Women," "A Tale of Two Cities" and anything by Laura Ingalls-Wilder were common depositories.

Fortunately, I've put that part of my life far behind me. I swore off snoose after stopping to fish Blue Mesa Reservoir one evening when the fish were hitting a hatch along the shore. I rigged up my fly rod, tied on my fly, took a wad of broad-leaf chew and started fishing. The fish were hitting so fast and furious, I forgot my earlier admonition about swallowing. Let's just say I had a miserable drive home that night. I never took another wad of snoose again.

Bruce Florquist is a retired geologist and engineer living in Severance.