Chapter 3, Part 2

By Frank Tursi, Susan E. White and Steve McQuilkin
JOURNAL REPORTERS
© Winston-Salem Journal

There were two lessons from Cavalier. The first was that a cigarette with a lousy taste wasn't going to fly. The second was that trying to shoehorn any new brand into the cigarette market was an uphill fight. Everything had to be right.

Ed Darr twisted arms until Reynolds executives decided to make a cigarette with a filter. (Journal File Photo)

Not surprisingly, the RJR board was lukewarm about a filtered brand.

Bowman Gray Jr., then the company's sales manager, recalled the board as reluctant to change course, ''bent and determined not to leap out with a filter prematurely, just to be among the starters at the post in the race that was then shaping up.''

But Ed Darr was a stubborn man, and, like a preacher, he was convinced of the righteousness of his cause.

''He had a great deal of trouble at the company,'' said Deborah Sartin, one of Darr's daughters. ''They fought him. They did not want filters. It was a long fight.''

But Darr was ready. He had spent more than 30 years at RJR and knew the company's internal politics and pressure points. In a company built on conformity, Darr was a bit of an outsider. He was born in Baltimore, which made him somewhat suspect to people in the North and South. He had worked as a tobacco wholesaler before hiring on with RJR in 1920. By 1937, he was the sales manager. And with the promotion came a seat on the company's board of directors. As sales manager and then as president, Darr traveled widely, always hawking RJR cigarettes. A smoker of a competing brand often found Darr crushing that pack and then handing the person a Camel.

Darr was an imposing man. He had played tackle on a club football team in Baltimore and, even pushing 61, still had the build and bearing of an athlete. He knew how to make people sit still and take notice.

The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. was once the largest cigarette company in the United States with a powerhouse of best-selling brands: Winston, Salem and Camel. But times changed, and as the case against smoking became more pronounced in the 1960s, RJR failed to adapt to the marketplace. Its rivals would eventually rush past it, and RJR's efforts to catch up would have a profound impact on the company and the cigarette industry.

He liked order and demanded discipline. ''We didn't ever know when we did something good, but we knew when we did something bad,'' Sartin said.

The Darr family day was structured, with periods for work, play and instruction. Each evening he would play with the children, such as throwing a baseball or football in the yard on Glade Street. He also liked card games _ gin, poker and bridge. ''He liked to see how your mental processes were working,'' Sartin said. ''That's what he was really doing. But we didn't know what he was doing. We thought we were just playing games.

''Every night at dinner we had the Fundamentals of Life _ that was the discussion,'' Sartin said. In reality it was a lecture from Darr, who would talk about honesty, charity and integrity.

''Then the floor was open, but nobody ever said anything,'' Sartin said.

In a city where the religion of the ruling class was mainline Protestantism, Darr was a Christian Scientist. Before coming to Reynolds, he started to have vision problems and felt that he was losing his sight. An older man in New York City took him to a Christian Science church for a healing. Darr's eyesight improved and he became a Christian Scientist. ''He wouldn't talk about that (healing) either,'' Deborah Sartin said. ''We just knew he had it.''

The Wave of the Future

Darr had faith in something else _ the future of filters. He badgered his fellow directors, and finally they agreed. RJR's fledgling research department began work on a filter tip. A year later, in 1952, the company was still lost in research. But Darr was now president. He ordered Haddon S. Kirk, the vice president for manufacturing, to develop a blend for a filter-tipped cigarette.

The RJR board and many of the company's senior executives were still resistant, but Darr's vision was coming into focus. RJR's management could grouse all it wanted about filters, but a growing number of smokers wanted them. Lorillard was rolling out Kent. Viceroy, made by Brown & Williamson, had doubled in sales in 1952.

Suddenly, RJR's line in the sand against filters looked foolhardy. A bit of fear was running through the company, a nagging feeling that, as Gray said, ''we had all our eggs, or certainly our cigarettes, in one basket.''

The company swung into action. It was determined not to screw things up, as it had with Cavalier. The new filter brand would have to taste good, and it would have to get to the market quickly, before the competition got too firmly established.

Another fear, this one unspoken, was also driving the move to filters: More smokers were beginning to worry about their health. Gray only hinted at these fears when he outlined the reasons that RJR developed a filter brand. ''We recognized in the movements of the market, in the changing opinions of the public, that change was in the wind, and were determined to do something about it.'' (Furst footnote; Gray's views on the competitive situation surrounding Winston.)

Blending tobacco is part science, part art. The flue-cured gives smoothness; the Oriental, bite. There are recipes, but the magic is in finding the right balance. RJR had done it with Camel, but it would be trickier with a filter.

When tobacco companies want to find out what their competitors are doing, they buy a carton or two of the other guy's smokes. Reynolds was keenly interested in Viceroy at the time.

''And so we took these cigarettes into our laboratories and we analyzed them and we smoked them,'' said Murray Senkus, a former director of research. ''Then we separated filters from the tobacco rods and changed them around.''

''We were able to find tobaccos with the extra amount of flavor to make up for the flavor that would be lost in filtration,'' Senkus said. ''And that, in a nutshell, is the key to the quality of the first Reynolds filter.''

A team that included Darr, Gray and Chairman John C. Whitaker developed the new cigarette. It was Gray, though, who decided on the blend. For all his patrician background, Gray fancied himself a regular fellow. If a cigarette tasted good to him, then he thought it would also taste good to others.

The test panel smoked 250 versions of filtered cigarettes. When Gray took a few puffs of blend No. 736 one day in early 1954, he proclaimed, ''This is it. Let's go all out for it.''

Finding the right blend wasn't the only obstacle. The product still needed a name. ''We wanted one word, solid and authoritative _ a word that could easily be identified everywhere with the pleasure of the most choice and flavorsome cigarettes,'' Gray said. The word also had to easily form the plural.

''Then someone said `Winston.' ''

March 24, 1954, was the launch date of Winston. Behind the scenes, Reynolds executives were worried. They knew they had a good cigarette. But they wondered whether they would have enough of them. Brown & Williamson had guessed wrong with Viceroy and been unable to meet the demand. So months before Winston's introduction, Reynolds quietly began gearing up for what would become a massive manufacturing campaign.

In some ways, RJR was starting from scratch. It had never made filter cigarettes, and it had to order the tipping machines from England. The first three machines were shipped on the Queen Mary in March, while a dock strike crippled ports along the East Coast. The ship returned to England, with RJR's machines still aboard. The company ended up shipping the machines by air, two a day for five days.(Tilley footnote; machinery and filter problems)

There were still problems. The tipping machines didn't work well. The joint between filter and cigarette wasn't always firm. Kirk once received a letter sent to Reynolds in care of the ''vice president in charge of goose necks.''

Reynolds had known about this glitch even before Winston's launch. Again, the company went overseas, this time to Germany. Hauni Maschinenfabrik Korber had a tipping machine that kicked out 1,000 perfect filtered cigarettes a minute. By early May, Darr had ordered 114 Haunis.

Usually, RJR and the other manufacturers gave away cigarettes when they launched a brand. Not this time. ''We were selling every single one we could possibly make. So, how could we give them away?'' Gray said.

The demand for Winston was extraordinary. The factories in downtown Winston-Salem hummed. Workers volunteered for late shifts to keep production up. It was like the old days, back when Camel became king.