Pipe dream

Bill Schultz has an article in The New York Times:

In 1976, my membership certificate for Keen’s English Chop House’s Pipe Club arrived in my parents’ mailbox, a gift from my godfather, James Elkins McIlvain. I hadn’t yet turned two. I never did ask Uncle Jim whether the gesture was a hope that I, too, would one day puff away at his favorite hangout, or if he merely giggled at the image of an infant inhaling from such an instrument— it looked as if it should be filled with opium rather than aged tobacco— like some sort of diaper-clad burgher.
Starting in 1885, when Albert Keen opened his restaurant and saloon, now known as Keens Steakhouse, the destination has provided post-dinner pipes to the likes of Babe Ruth, Theodore Roosevelt, and Buffalo Bill Cody. Keen, who managed the acting and literary society called the Lamb’s Club on West 36th Street, in what was then the theatre district, opened up his self-named restaurant next door. Players at the nearby Garrick Theater would pop by, in full costume, and pound Glenmorangie as if it were Gatorade in between acts of their shows.
The churchwarden pipes in question are roughly fifteen inches long, emblazoned with the handwritten number assigned to each owner and kept on the premises, since they are far too fragile to transport. New members would receive their pipes, cards bearing the identifying digits, and, back in the day, complimentary plum pudding delivered every Christmas. The most current models are made in Holland by a company called Royal Delta and are far more Shakespearean than Sherlockian in appearance. It is written that the “church” moniker comes from the old chapel officers, who created a stem long enough to reach out past the stained-glass windows so that they might smoke away during Mass.
My mother recently found my card and letter of introduction in an old file cabinet (“his ‘churchwarden,’ bearing the above number, is in our custody and reserved for his use whenever he partakes in the tavern’s hospitality” the probably now-dead manager wrote). My mother promptly mailed the documents to my Midtown apartment, whereupon I framed and nailed this little slice of the town’s more tobacco-friendly past onto my least-stained wall, confident in the fact that I’d never actually locate the receptacle itself.
Sadly, a long-ago office fire, along with a brief closing in 1979, compromised both Keens’ files and, I assumed, any chances I had of reclaiming my slow-burning birthright. Or so I thought, until a waiter recently informed me that if I still had my registration number, (it’s 98671), an employee could probably retrieve my yet-to-be-puffed present.
“We’re better off when we have a number, like in your case,” Keens’ general manager and default pipe wrangler, Bonnie Jenkins, said when I phoned her about my search-and-smoke mission. Jenkins has overseen daily operations at the restaurant since 1997, and has found long-lost clays— which are arrayed, in a confounding manner, along the expansive ceilings— for countless old regulars, their widows, and memento-seeking children.
Jenkins recalled a recent letter from a Royal Navy veteran who had been stationed in New York in 1942: “He sent his pipe card, said he just wanted us to know that he always remembers Keens, and that it was a really special time in his life, even though there was a war going on,” she said. Another woman wanted to find her dead father’s pipe for her mother, Jenkins said. “It took me two years, but I found it.”
I kept that fact in mind as the days turned into weeks after our initial conversation, as the “no dice” emails kept coming from Keens. Between the attic with its shelves full of haphazardly filed clays, and the ninety thousand churchwardens stashed above the old photos, newspaper clippings, and other odd ephemera covering the restaurant’s six expansive dining rooms, I was beginning to lose faith.
Then, two weeks ago, I opened another email from Jenkins, which stated simply, but ebulliently: “We found it!”
My heart became as full as my lungs soon would be, as I smiled over the idea of a long-delayed meeting between pipe and person. I asked Jenkins if she ever found a clay for someone like me who had gotten it as a child, but had never actually seen the thing. She thought about it for a moment, and then replied, excitedly: “You’re the first!”
The next Monday morning, I strolled into the still-closed restaurant for the unveiling. Jenkins— slight of frame, with shoulder-length brown hair and the type of boundless energy that should be illegal at such an early hour— greeted me warmly and brought me straight up into the bowels of the pipe room.
“First I looked here,” Jenkins said of the pile of musty boxes containing unclaimed clays from the teens, ’20s, ’30s, and so on. “No one has ever been in this room, apart from employees. Nobody ever gets to go up here.” She then grabbed several nearby examples and showed them to me. “You can see how these have the little stems on them,” she said.
The two of us made our way down to the Lincoln Room, where the Ford’s Theater playbill that President Lincoln held right before John Wilkes Booth’s bullet met his brain is improbably displayed near the entrance.
“I just climbed up on my stepladder,” explained Jenkins, re-enacting her needle-in-a-haystack triumph by the room’s bar, “and couldn’t make out the last two numbers at first, because of where it was located. And then I got very excited.”
The feeling was mutual. She went on to perform the traditional presentation of the pipe, which was covered with a purple napkin on a platter. And then, with a flick of her wrist, voila, there was the maple brown beauty (emblazoned with the signifying 98671) that I was supposed to have received during the Carter administration.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg enacted a citywide smoking ban in 2003, but not before being presented with an honorary pipe during a dinner at Keens. “He was very gracious,” Jenkins recalled. “We gave him the pipe a day before the ban took effect, actually.” While Bloomberg’s unused clay sits nestled among other signed stems from the likes of Tom Hanks, Muhammad Ali, and Liza Minnelli, I was forced to go outside in forty-degree weather to take my inaugural smoke.
As the wooden door shut behind me, I stuffed some recently bought tobacco into the head of the churchwarden, pulled out a match, and sucked away while trying to get the surprisingly stubborn little memento to light. Finally, the bowl grew hot enough that I moved my hand to the nub below, and I was in business.
I was as surprised at how much I enjoyed the sweet, oaky taste as I was saddened that this would probably be the last time I’d puff publicly, because, let’s face it, in this day and age, anyone caught trying to smoke something that resembles a prop from The Lord of the Rings would immediately be called a jerk.
Keens’ custom holds that when a member dies, friends and family ceremoniously break the stem of his or her churchwarden so that it can never be smoked again. “When one falls off the ceiling, or something, we go, ‘Oh, no!’ ” Jenkins said, chuckling. “It’s sort of like every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.”
My godfather died of cancer at the age of 63, in 2009. I hadn’t done a very good job of keeping in touch with him, and never got to ask him if he, too, was a pipe holder. But it would make sense that he would want his godson to be in the club of which he was an esteemed member. It is therefore comforting to think that Uncle Jim’s clay is still collecting dust somewhere above Keens’ ancient lighting fixtures.
Or that, perhaps, his churchwarden ended up shattering, upon meeting the floor, three years ago in January.

Rico says the story was cool enough to start with (and the fact that Keens is the company that makes his sole footwear would surely attract the eye). As for 'pound Glenmorangie as if it were Gatorade'? That should be on the invitation to his sixtieth birthday party. But Babe Ruth, Theodore Roosevelt, and Buffalo Bill Cody? That's an amazing trio of customers...