Smokers' Hall of Fame

     When I worked at Roswell Park Research Institute, a cancer research facility and hospital, there was a display in the main research administration building called the Smokers' Hall of Fame. I don't know when it was put in place, but my time at Roswell was 1977 to 1983.

     Cigarette smoking had been determined to be a cause of lung cancer, and by the 1970's, surgeon-general warnings on cigarette packs had appeared, many adults attempted and many succeeded in quitting their habit, and announcements to try to get young people to not start smoking had begun.

     And so Roswell Park, a cancer research institute had the Smokers' Hall of Fame – pictures on display along a hallway of famous people who smoked and who had died of cancer – the ones I remember being on the wall are Humphrey Bogart, Walt Disney, and Nat King Cole. The message I got from the wall was that if these big famous stars had not smoked, they might still be alive and entertaining us, and if regular folks who saw the Smokers' Hall of Fame were to quit smoking, perhaps our loved ones could spend a little more time on earth with us and escape the horrors of cancer.

     When my daughters were little, I told them about the Smokers' Hall of Fame – but the three names I mentioned above were the only ones I could remember. So when we went to Western New York in 1997 – 20 years after I had started at Roswell, I took the girls directly over to the admin building to see the Smoker's Hall of Fame for themselves. But the walls I remembered no longer displayed the Smokers' Hall of Fame. I was kind of disappointed because I was morbidly curious to see what other famous faces would have been added since my days working there.

     Later during our visit, when we had lunch with my former boss at Roswell, I mentioned the Hall of Fame, and he said that the pictures had been taken down because the display had been deemed politically incorrect. But one of the big cancer research speakers who worked at Roswell had all the pictures in his possession, and he used them as a Smokers' Moving Wall of Fame when he gave talks across the country.

     I wonder if folks get the same message I got when they see the pictures?

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