What Cigarette Ads Didn't Show

The idyllic scenes that sold smoking were nothing like the terrible reality of cancer

- Hugh J. Mooney

IN 'CIGARETTE COUNTRY, television commercials show two or three handsome, rugged cowboys on beautiful horses. Or there are sports cars, planes or scuba gear. The scene is always one of clean, windswept health. The people have a look of supreme confidence; the lovely girls all smile.

I know another country. It is a land from which few return. In this sad region there are no strong men, no smiling, pretty girls. Executives and store clerks there look very much alike, not only because they wear the same clothes, but because people living on the raw edge of a thin hope somehow get the same haunted expression on their faces. I am referring to cancer country. I have been there.

I AM 44 YEARS old, and have a wife and two small children. By 1963, I had a comfortable salary with an insurance firm, and the future seemed bright. In May of that year, I developed a slight difficulty in swallowing. Our family physician said that if it persisted for another week, he would arrange an appointment for me with a throat specialist. It did persist. The specialist diagnosed it simply as “a case of nerves”—a diagnosis that he was to reaffirm in October. Finally, in January 1964, convinced it was more than just nerves, I entered a hospital. And there the doctor told me, as gently as he could, that I had cancer of the throat.

The first thing that occurred to me was that I would die and Eileen, my wife, would have to give up the house. What a shame that my children would be able to grow up in that house! We had bought it only two years before.

The doctor suggested that I enter a well-known hospital. Two days later, Eileen and I drove there. I was a assigned to a four-bed room on the seventh floor of the east wing. This was known as Seven-East.