Who: Big Tobacco (Open) When: December, 1952; noon Where: Central Park, New York City
It was oppressively cold out, grey and uninviting, enough so to send most sane folk scurrying inside. Enough so that when the apparently insane man seated on the park bench exhaled his breath billowed briefly like a small white fog, or perhaps a puff of smoke. He didn't seem especially bothered by the weather. He had the look of a businessman, perhaps on his lunch hour; his tie was loosened and slightly askew and his collar was unbuttoned.
The man, who was known to his many friends as Leo Marlborough and to his considerably smaller circle of close friends simply as Big, was in fact in the employ of the esteemed public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. He was a likable fellow, and good at his job - extraordinarily good, in fact, although if asked nobody at the firm would be able to tell you what exactly that job was, or how long he had held it.
He had a copy of the latest Reader's Digest, which he was studying with an expression that might have indicated amusement or might have been annoyance. It was the feature article that had given him pause, the one that had got everybody in a flap lately; a piece demurely entitled CANCER BY THE CARTON. None of it was anything he hadn't heard before.
Scientists had been issuing warnings about Big Tobacco and his ilk for a couple of decades now, guys in lab coats bleating about shortened life expectancies and increased cancer rates, but they'd never been able to make anything stick. Oh, there'd be some muttering for a spell, but by and large there were few people for whom complex nerd speak and worried predictions about the future could overcome the simple, uncomplicated smooth taste of just one more cigarette today. No, sir. That just wasn't the American way.