Word: cigar
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...drivers of the old Conestoga wagons were inveterate smokers, and when the government first laid a tax on tobacco, these old wagoners were worried for fear they would have to give up their beloved smokes because of the high prices which the tax made necessary. George Black, a cigar manufacturer at Washington, came to their rescue with a cheap 'roll-up' which he sold at four for a cent. These 'smokes' immediately became popular with the wagoners who first called them 'Conestoga Cigars' which was later corrupted into 'stogies' and 'tobies...
Forrest was a pretty careful historian and he was acquainted with the Black family. Incidentally, many years ago when I worked in a Washington drug store, the best seller at the cigar counter was an "Ohio Flat," a variation with the damndest shape you ever...
Last Sunday night Manhattan's Windsor Theatre broke the Sabbath with a great scalawaggery of shimmying, shagging, rowdy flashing of black eyes and brown legs, a lively wigwagging of rumps. A comely Negro girl led the terpsichorean rout, rumbaing, impersonating Inca and Martinique maids, flaunting a big cigar in her mouth as a West Indian on an excursion, shimmying in a Florida barrel house, cakewalking as "de Tah Baby" in a ballet on Bre'r Rabbit. This live-wire dancer was Katherine Dunham, young Chicagoan, starting a series of Manhattan recitals with the best Negro dance group...
...labor of love, Calvin Coolidge was six years a-writing. Biographer Fuess read the letters Coolidge wrote, from schooldays on, to his father and stepmother (Col. John Coolidge kept them in a big mahogany cigar humidor); Mrs. Coolidge gave him personal documents, answered questions; he was permitted to ransack the Coolidge file of Frank W. Stearns, Boston department store tycoon and Coolidge's political deus ex machina; he talked to dozens who knew Coolidge. For his labors, Biographer Fuess has assembled more facts than did his livelier rival, William Allen White, whose Coolidge biography, A Puritan in Babylon...
...Reader Parker could be wronger, but not much. The Conestoga wagon was made in Conestoga, Pa., which had been named for the Conestoga Indians. To Conestoga went teamsters hauling lumber, tooling the team with one hand while they rolled a cigar with the other. Later Conestogas, or stogies, became favorites of the wagon trains freighting from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, where the drivers would sell the supply they had rolled along the way. Hence, Pittsburgh stogies. Wheeling came in on the freight...