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Says he: "I do believe that if a cigarette appeals to me—I'm a pretty average fella —it might appeal to the population." This week Gray, who smokes as many as four packs of Winstons a day (with an occasional Salem), was also puffing away at cigarettes from chalky white, unmarked testing packs. Through his mouth and into his windpipe he rolled the smoke with all the sober concentration of a winetaster. In the blank packs were cigarettes being tested as possible additions to half a dozen new brands that Reynolds already has on hand to put on the market when the time is ripe.
Though the company now has 30% of the cigarette market, Gray wants more.
Reynolds is building a 14-acre $30 million plant that will increase its capacity 30% next year. Last week Reynolds announced that it is moving into Europe, buying a 51% interest in West Germany's second largest cigarette firm of Haus Neu-erburg. Does the cancer talk give Gray pause? Says he: "I just don't believe it.
People are hearing the same old story, and the record is getting scratched, the needle stuck." Pattern of Hell. Many respected medical authorities flatly disagree with Bowman Gray. But then, the war against tobacco is as old as civilized man's first puff. What has changed is that the attacks that were once emotional and moral are now scientific. Ever since Columbus found the Caribbean Indians smoking "tobago" (their name for the primitive pipe in which they smoked tobacco) and smoking was introduced into Europe, the friends and foes of tobacco have been tearing at one another's T-zones.
Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake and the Frenchman Jean Nicot (after whom nicotine is named) all helped to popularize smoking, considered it good for the health. In 1614 a Scottish doctor named William Barclay wrote that tobacco "prepares the stomach for the acceptance of meat, makes the voice clear and the breath sweet," pushed it as an antidote for "hypochondric melancholy" and such diseases as arthritis and epilepsy.