Chapter 3, Part 3

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

Bowman Gray Jr. knew about the growing concerns surrounding cigarettes, the diatribes from the killjoys at Reader's Digest. He just didn't want this scientific nitpicking to get in the way of his advertising. Smokers didn't either. Smoking was about enjoyment, not cutaway drawings of a filter.

Some of RJR's competitors had gone down that road and were paying the price. Lorillard's new Kent cigarette was struggling, in part because its campaign focused on the science of its ''Micronite'' filter.

So here Gray was one afternoon in 1954, listening to the ad men from the William Esty Co. toss out ideas for Winston, which had been on the market for two months but was still a few months away from national distribution.

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.

The theme was that Winston had a filter but didn't taste like it had one.

One ad guy shouted out, ''Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Ought To.''

Gray winced. Then someone in the room yelled out an amended version. ''Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should.'' It was perfect. People around the room shouted or nodded their heads in approval. Sure, it wasn't grammatically correct. English teachers throughout the country would soon be aghast that the company was misusing the word ''like'' in place of ''as.'' But that only made it more delicious.

The slogan's first appearance was in a Pittsburgh newspaper in September 1954. It would hit Life magazine the next month. During the summer, Winston took over as sponsor of Walter Cronkite's morning news show and it replaced Cavalier as sponsor of Garry Moore's variety show.

By then the slogan was paired with toe-tapping music. The first version had no pop. Adlai Hardin of the Esty agency said that it was too predictable. A clap-clap was added after the first line, but that wasn't much of an improvement.

''You're not breaking the rhythm,'' Hardin said. The clap-clap was moved to the middle of the second line so that the voice was left hanging intriguingly:

''Winston Tastes Good Like a (clap-clap) Cigarette Should.''

In some commercials people would tap something, such as the side of a truck. In a Flintstones commercial that ran in the early 1960s, Fred flicked his lighter twice.

America loved it.

Robert Powell of Macon, Ga., wrote a letter to Reynolds in 1958 praising a ''young saleslady'' at Dixon Drug Store in Macon for saying the Winston slogan every time Powell and other customers bought Winstons. ''Thought this might give you an idea to arrange for all sales people to adopt the above practice because it does attract attention and elicits many smiles and favorable comments,'' Powell said.

Powell closed his letter on a more serious note.

''Also wanted to give you a pat on the back in regards to Winstons,'' he wrote. ''Smoked Camels for about 20 years but when the articles began appearing about cancer, after trying most every brand with filters, I chose Winstons because they were the nearest thing to a real cigarette smoke I could find.''

Charlie Kueper of Cahokia, Ill., was another Winston smoker. He was barely out of high school when he started smoking Winstons regularly. He would be faithful to the brand for 31 years and would later say that his devotion to Winstons was what killed him. Winston was a rocket. By 1956, it was the fourth best-selling brand in the country, behind Camel, Lucky Strike and Pall Mall. Two years later, Reynolds toppled American Tobacco to regain its position as the nation's biggest cigarette company. Reynolds executives thought early on that Winston could put Reynolds back on top.

''The advertising was good,'' said Bill Hobbs, a longtime manufacturing executive and former president of RJR. ''It was a lot easier at the time than it was later when we were restricted from TV and all those things.''

But there was another, more sobering lesson behind Winston's rise. The brand's success wasn't tied just to Ed Darr's vision and Bowman Gray's taste in tobacco. RJR's top rival, American Tobacco, had screwed up and dropped the ball.

Camel was the top cigarette when Winston came out, but its heyday was past. Since 1953, when the cancer scare first hit smokers, Camel had dropped like a stone, from 99 billion cigarettes a year to 63 billion in 1958. American's Lucky Strike was getting slammed as well.

But American had momentum with Pall Mall Kings, which had been growing rapidly and would overtake Camel in 1960.

''We were hoping they wouldn't put a filter on it, and they didn't,'' Hobbs said of Pall Mall Kings. ''That was a major mistake.''

And one that American apparently realized too late. American's first filter cigarette was Tareyton, introduced in 1954. Pall Mall wouldn't get a filter until 1965. By then it was over. Winston rushed past Pall Mall in 1966, the same year RJR finally put a filter on Camel.

Moving Into Menthol

Winston wasn't RJR's only success. As that brand was launched, the company was already planning an attack on the menthol market, which most companies had paid little attention to.

The exception was Brown & Williamson, which had sold Kools since the 1930s. Salem, to be the first filtered menthol, was already on the drawing board by the mid-1950s, but it was considered the best-kept secret in the industry.

''No one ever suspected we had this filter-tipped menthol entry packaged and ready to roll,'' Gray said. Even some of the directors were in the dark.

Salem wasn't just a menthol version of Winston.

It was a different blend, with more burley than Winston and less menthol than Kool. Its advertising was keyed to light, refreshing ''spring-time'' smoking. ''Refreshing as the all outdoors,'' was the slogan. The packs were green, and RJR pushed the brand in magazines, rather than on radio, because ''we wanted people to see the Salem theme,'' Gray said.

Salem's introduction was set for January 1957. To help Salem stand out in the crowd, RJR wanted to sell the brand in a hard pack.

The launch date and box were scrapped when Reynolds executives learned that Philip Morris was getting ready to sell a menthol filter reworked from an existing brand. It was called Spud, and had limped along with little success since 1944.

Reynolds went into overdrive to rush Salem out ahead of Philip Morris.

''We didn't have the equipment for box manufacturing and we decided to go with the soft pack,'' said Bill Smith, at the time the assistant sales manager.

The packaging material arrived on Saturday morning and the first Salems were rolling out of the packing room within 24 hours. Reynolds introduced Salem on April 30, 1956. It went national a week later. The launch week was particularly hectic for Smith.

On Monday morning, he and Bill Carter, the sales manager, flew on a company plane to Boston with a half-dozen cases for a meeting and to introduce the brand. Tuesday was New York. Then Smith flew back to Winston-Salem and caught a commercial flight to Atlanta on Wednesday. Thursday was Dallas. Then Friday was Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, Ore.

''And all along that trip, I was smoking Salems and offering them to people on the airplanes, and the taxi drivers, anyone that I came in contact with who were non-Reynolds people,'' Smith said.

''And the reaction was phenomenal because the only menthol brand then, of any consequence, was Kool _ which was a very popular menthol but Salem had a much lighter menthol taste and more tobacco taste and it took off like a jet.''

Within a year, Salem had caught Kool. By 1960, RJR was selling 35 billion Salems a year, and the brand had 7.5 percent of the market. It would take 12 years for Kool to catch up. ''It surprised everyone in the business how successful both brands were because it took off faster than anything that had been introduced in the cigarette business,'' Smith said. ''. . . Actually, we almost had to ration them. We never really got to that point, but it was touch and go to have enough to supply the demand.''

The shift to filter cigarettes drove a change in advertising. Smoking ads no longer emphasized glamour. Instead, it was all about safety and enjoyment. Men in business suits were replaced with couples smoking while enjoying a Sunday drive or an outing next to a lake or river.

Salem's theme was perfect for the times. The Esty agency came up with another hummable winner: ''You can take Salem out of the country, but you can't take the country out of Salem.''

In about 1963, Smith attended a sales-management conference at Ohio State University. The lecturer was Art Cullman, a marketing professor, and he shared the story of Salem's introduction as a classic example of the importance of timing in the consumer-products business.

Cullman knew something about the tobacco business. His brother was Joseph Cullman III, the president of Philip Morris, whose Spud menthol had fizzled under direct fire from RJR.

Smith found the lesson particularly satisfying.

''We had beaten them to the punch by getting ours out first, and that was one of the programs that he taught,'' Smith said.