Restaurants, airplanes, hospitals, grocery stores. Your doctor smoked during your checkup. Teachers smoked in the teachers' lounge and came back smelling like an ashtray. Nobody thought twice about it.
I remember my grandfather lighting up a Camel in the waiting room at St. Mary's hospital while my grandmother was having surgery. A nurse walked by, saw him, and asked if she could bum one. That's what 1964 was like.
The smell of cigarette smoke still takes me to my childhood kitchen. My mother at the table with her Virginia Slims and her crossword puzzle, the smoke curling up past the yellow curtains she had to wash every month because they turned brown.