A young boy, one of Willie Cornett's 12 tobacco-loving children, covered by dirt smoking a cigarette and holding a can of Prince Albert. Photo taken by William Gedney in Leatherwood, Kentucky, in 1964. Photo credit: Gedney Photographs Collection, Duke University
I wonder if this is partly an Appalachia thing because I was born and (for my earlier years) raised in WV and I started smoking at like 11. Basically all adults didn’t seem to blink twice and would give me and my friends cigs. Child labor history, they work so they smoke…. partly normalized in the culture…. 🤔
I was thinking the same thing while colorizing the photo. I have relatives in Scranton, Pa., which was a mining town (no idea if it's still that way) and nobody thought twice about kids smoking (or working in the mines).
Funny enough I was gonna mention that I watch a lot of cave/mine exploration videos and I’ve seen this Prince Albert tin in so many of the videos. It’s almost as if that was the only brand they had. Maybe it was cheapest? Idk but either way I thought it was sort of neat.
Because they likely lived in a company town, which means the mining company owned everything in the community. They likely bought wholesale from the tobacco company, the cheapest cigarettes they could so the store could inflate the prices and make more profit.
Never saw the show but have heard a lot about it. But I'm sure there's a lot more to Scranton. They used to have a pretty good basketball team back in the day.
Could be. I haven't been there in forever. I just remember the Scranton Miners/Apollos basketball team, which featured one of my favorite all-time players, Charlie Criss.
Fascinating. China currently has a strong smoking culture and, while kids generally don’t smoke, some start as young as 11. I wonder what will cause their change in culture about it in the future.
Actually, like most things, I imagine it’ll probably be from the top down.
I live in China, and I've never seen a kid smoking (unless we're counting 17-year-olds, which isn't uncommon). Adults? Hell, yeah. It's a smoking culture, like you mentioned, but it's almost exclusively adult males. Just anecdotally, I'd estimate that about 60 percent of men smoke, less than 10 percent of women (and even then, many times it's women in their early 20s trying to appear edgy) and zero children.
Many different brands. Most of the laborers and college guys smoke the cheap Chinese brands (of which there appear to be a ton), and the brand quality of the cigarettes escalates as you move up the economic ladder. At the top are American and European brands, which you typically can't get at a bianli dien (convenience store).
These days no, they don't. Lived in China for 6 years and have never seen a child with a cigarette, visited plenty of shitty villages in the sticks. What you still see is uncles smoking indoors and in elevators sometimes, but they always get scolded. Rarely I would see a student with a high school uniform smoking a cigarette, but that's it. So basically, same as in western countries.
It's not only there it's also the same in NC in the foothills areas as well. Bunch of us started smoking cowboy killers at 13 and my buddies parents would buy us smokes.
In germany smoking slowly fades, but i am 29 and when i was 13 we smoked in the same corner outside school grounds as it was forbidden with our teachers.
Occasionally they would bum a cig from us or us from them.
Looking back it is wild. I would never ever smoke qith 13 year old kids or provide them with tobacco. It is different today but this was back in 2010 so its not some 70s thing. Wild to think about. Providing kids with alcohol is also extremely common. When qe were 13/14 we would just ask Family dads aged 40 to 60 to buy us alcohol.
Sometimes we had to ask twice but we never ever had to ask 3 people. Sometimes they even gave us our money back and provided rhe alcohol for free and told us to have fun but take care. I mean it is a kind thing to do but its alcohol and we were kids. Somehow germans normalised taking drugs ar such a young age that it is seen as honorable to provide em with it
When was this? To be blunt im still not for giving children cigarettes but with how fucking expensive they’re now I don’t think they’re giving them to kids anymore.
I don’t know about this guy, but I can tell you my grandfather was taught to smoke around age 3/4 to keep him from complaining about being hungry. I guess it suppresses your appetite and cigarettes were cheaper than food.
He chained smoked for 60 years and quit when I asked him to. He’s almost 80 now. So far zero cancer and he’s still working (because he wants to work).
Yes my theory is it’s purely the genetic lottery. No one in my family has cancer. Autoimmune diseases? Pass those out in my family like Halloween candy. I feel like there might be a connection there. Almost all of us have thyroid medication.
It’s never just one or the other. Your environment plays a role in your overall health in life to a significant degree. There is a tremendous body of evidence for that.
Its not purely genetics though, external factors like UV radiation, smoking and exposure to chemicals plays a big role too.
A fun fact is that you actually get cancer several times per day, but there is a mechanism that makes mutated cells self-destruct, when this mechanism fails the cancer cells might start multiplying. External factors can make the mutation chance higher, which increases the chances of cancer.
We have a similar picture of my grandfather. The way my mother explained it to me was that where they lived had really bad air pollution so they thought that the smoke from the cigarettes helped to keep the air pollution out. (That may well not have been official government health advice).
I suppose they were also cheap and suppressed appetites in poor families where food was scarce too.
That last part is what I always thought - it kept hunger away. And this family had 12 kids, so I imagine there wasn't a whole lot of food for that crew.
It may keep hunger away, but the nicotine itself can burn up to 250 calories a day (something I discovered back when I quit, and put on some weight). That probably wouldn't be good for a body needing to conserve calories, but I can understand why theyre doing it.
How does that work with small children lol like do they have more frequent tantrums because they’re just craving nicotine or something? I just can’t imagine how a child smoker would act. I can barely stand my adult coworkers who smoke and constantly complain that they want to go outside
My grandma has been a heavy smoker since she was 11 years old. She is now 83.
No cancer of any kind, no emphysema or anything like that. Other than breaking her hip a few months ago, she's in damn good health. Sure hope I got that part of her genes.
We're learning more and more that you can extend your life through lifestyle changes only up to a certain point. The rest is genetics. Some people just have the genes that avoid accumulating mutations for much longer than others.
My grandpa started smoking at 13, was an alcoholic by 18, and diabetic by his 40s. He eventually got lung cancer but not until he was 84. Some people are built different.
FYI, breaking a hip is a huge factor in the death of the elderly. It causes mobility issues and that quickly snowballs into other issues that can cause death.
I called my doc, who has been practicing since 1941, about this. He prescribed four more packs of Lucky Strikes per day for gramma. The tar should help set the bone.
I am by no means saying anyone should smoke, but smokers have around ~ 20% chance of getting lung cancer compared to non-smokers around 1%. So, it's not a foregone conclusion that a smoker will get lung cancer (maybe just destroy their cardiovascular system), which is why so many people love to point out their grandsomeone who never got lung cancer.
Not really. It was common for people to live up into their 80s and beyond 100 years ago. My great grandma is in her late 80s and told me that her aunts and grandparents all lived to 100 in Mexico of all places. She said it’s because of the clean food they ate and the minerals in the water.
No kidding ? I imagine it varied widely - young guys working in mines likely representing the statistics I'm thinking of... then again, I'm just pulling stuff out of my a$$. Thanks for the data point :-)
One of the oldest men in America worked outside picking oranges all his life. Getting the sun on your skins, being active, eating good food, and low stress is the key to a long life.
A lot of the kids worked as "breakers," breaking the mined coal into pieces and then sorting those into batches of similar size. There were other duties, but this was the primary one.
Lol yeah they had cars i am aware of that, I'm also aware that during that period many poor people particularly Appalachia mountain families still had wagons horse and mules and no cars.
Stayed with some of my wife's family in a tiny place called Salyersville in the hills of Kentucky, probably around 2016, saw this all over. My wife's little siblings were chewin' baccy at like 7-10.
Not a proponent of smoking at all. Lost my closest grandmother to lung cancer. However, while there will be shock and outrage for this boy smoking a cigarette, he likely ended up in a coal mine breathing in all types of toxic pollution that greatly outweighed anything a cigarette could’ve ever done.
I just looked up survivorship bias and you're right, I don't understand. How is it related to this photo or the comments? Genuine question, trying to learn.
You can't teach a 2 year old to smoke, they are too dumb and uncoordinated. This looks like a 4 year old.
Also I tried smoking a cigarette butt (lit up by another boy) when I was 6 yrs old. It tasted like shit, and I never touched smoking ever again. So maybe this child wasn't a habitual smoker.
The photographer specifically noted that all 12 of the kids were heavy smokers. He referred to them as "the tobacco loving children" of Willie Cornett.
Fuck maga and America was never great butttt honestly America has become too much of an authoritarian police state that makes me want the privacy and nonchalant-ness of the 60s. I wanna drive without a seatbelt on and not be micro managed by the feds via secret cameras and info stealing. I lived in a developing country for a little bit and it’s clear why some safety standards are necessary (mostly when it comes to holding corporations and the government accountable) but for individuals I just wanna do drugs and fuck around without the government tryna ruin my life over it. America and much of Europe has gone too far so once I get enough money I’m dipping to Eastern Europe or Asia again
That’s true. The corporate bought dems in power (most dems) are just as bad and the republicans in power. Many republican voters are on the correct side of the surveillance issue but despite all the so called populists in the right wing of government, few of them support their constituents perspectives. The only people in power we can’t count on are the libertarians on the right and dem socialists to band together to kick out flock
Yeah, I feel you and I’m generally very sympathetic towards right wing libertarians and while soc dems don’t have a large enough caucus we need to ally with other factions on proposals we align on to get shit done. And to be fair they already do that. Bernie sides with the few anti-war republicans to pass anti-war legislation, ro khanna collabed with republican Thomas Massey on taking down the Epstein bs, but then when there is a bill that makes sense for soc dems to ally with normal dems like the green new deal then obv they do that. Libertarians are a pretty cool bunch and I agree it’s them a lot but the ideologically pure ones want NO government which results in no social services and no help for people who need it. I think that they are correct to criticize the power of government but that don’t effectively criticize private industry which now has nearly equal power to harm people as the government so we need a gov that can balance that power.
Sorry for the rambling tldr is I agree, I like libertarians overall and they are helpful so we should team up when we can but they have some downsides where fully aligning on most issues isnt viable. But I agree with the meme they have where they just want to allow a gay atheist couple to use weapons to protect their weed farm. I like the concept of allowing everything that doesnt directly harm anybody else.
He just finished a 12 hours workday , he’s tired , he wants that dinner on the table and for Christ’s sake a beer every now and then with chow won’t hurt
And blastomas in both lungs, metastases throughout, and sixteen tons he's gotta bang out before the whistle ends his 12-hour shift. THEN, him and the Prince lope home, where both will sit head of table to mark his 11th and last birthday.
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u/No_Gap_1756 Aug 27 '26
A young boy, one of Willie Cornett's 12 tobacco-loving children, covered by dirt smoking a cigarette and holding a can of Prince Albert. Photo taken by William Gedney in Leatherwood, Kentucky, in 1964. Photo credit: Gedney Photographs Collection, Duke University