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New York-born and Texas-raised, Tobaccoman Gruber got a law degree at Tennessee's Cumberland University ('14), soon gave up law for selling, got a job with Lorillard in 1922. He crisscrossed the U.S., shook as many hands as a senatorial candidate, cultivated tobacco distributors. He rose steadily, selling hard on Lorillard's catchy Old Gold slogans, which, like other tobacco com panies' ads, conveniently played both sides of the cigarette v. health issue. At first Lorillard advertised Old Golds as "healthful treats," trumpeted, "Not a Cough in a Carload." Then, as reports grew that cigarettes damage health, Lorillard ridiculed them with "We're Tobacco Men, Not Medicine Men," and "For a Treat Instead of a Treatment." By the time Gruber had advanced to sales vice president in 1952, evidence pointing to cigarette tar as a cancer cause became so strong that Lorillard figured a filter was needed to combat it. That year, at Gruber's urging, Lorillard introduced Kent. It was the first filter to hammer at the health angle. But after a brisk start it flopped, because its filter was so compressed that, as Lorillard admen said, "it was like smoking through a mattress." Salesman Gruber argued that a better-drawing, lower-priced Kent could sell. The Lorillard board, burned by Kent and ripped by dissension, opposed many Gruber ideas. But by 1956, after Lorillard sales had skidded 20% in three years, the board tapped Gruber to take over the ship. Thirty minutes after being elected, Gruber ordered the price of Kent slashed by 5¢ a pack. Kent sales tripled within eleven months.
As the talk of smoking and cancer mounted, Gruber figured that smokers would want a still-higher-filtration cigarette, with a better taste. At the time, many other companies were pushing full-flavored filter smokes (which had high tar) to match Reynolds' best-selling Winston, still the top-selling filter. Gruber and his top brass personally smoked hundreds of test Kent samples in what one former Lorillard adman called "the most incestuous market-testing program in business history."
One day, as Gruber tells the tale, he inhaled deeply on a numbered sample, broke into a smile, dashed down the halls of his Manhattan office, chanting: "That's it, boys, that's it." Shortly after, Lorillard poured millions into a new ad campaign; coincidentally, the Reader's Digest singled out the new Kent for praise. Kent zipped up, last year became the fifth-bestselling cigarette, after Camel, Pall Mall, Lucky Strike, Winston.
But his methods have not endeared him to competitors. They grumble that his low-tar ad campaigns have played up "the health issues," which most cigarette men would rather drop in the ashtray. Gruber himself has refused to let the medical findings change his own smoking habits. He still smokes three to four packs a day.