Where there's smoke.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: Up Front

As a reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal, I once wrote a story that began: "Like those who smoke them, Camel cigarettes are a dying breed." The lead sentence didn't make it past the city editor. This was the late '70s, back when tobacco companies--despite the warnings that the feds forced them to put on their packs--didn't give an inch when it came to admitting the health hazards of smoking. And this was a city that owed its prosperity to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

But I was referring to demographics, not disease. The story was based on an interview with an RJR marketing manager. Most folks huffing Camels--the stubby, strong-tasting, unfiltered smokes that the company introduced in 1913--were old guys. My grandpa smoked them. So did John Wayne, until he lost a lung. (He bragged about beating the "Big C," but, years later, it sneaked up and got him in the gut.) You could see the brand fading like Ethan Edwards as he walks away from the closing door at the end of The Searchers. The marketer bragged that his data was so good he could almost pinpoint the date it would vanish.

When the story appeared, Reynolds flacks raised such a ruckus that the paper ran what amounted to a retraction. The Camel brand, they vowed, had a bright future. (The marketing guy suddenly was incommunicado.) I shrugged it off, figuring that this was more of the flat-earther denial of reality that seemed to afflict the tobacco industry back then. Little did I--nor, apparently, the marketer--know that the brand would be reinvigorated as a milder, filtered cigarette targeted to a much younger market. Old Joe, the dromedary...