[Ah ... the good old days.]


"Search for smoker was no pipe dream"

"The front page of the old Wisconsin News on July 14, 1933, is dominated by three large photos showing Hubert Albert smoking his little brains out.

It was newsworthy because he was 5 years old at the time. The accompanying article says the Milwaukee boy started puffing at the age of 20 months - cigarettes, cigars, pipes, you name it. "He's not 6 years old yet, but he knows how to smoke - anything," the headline says.

Sally Wasinack thinks that headline today would be a bit different, "something involving social services and an arrest, perhaps."

Sally and her husband, Tim, recently found this old newspaper and others under the floorboards and inside the walls while remodeling their 100-year-old house in Hustisford.

Progress on the renovation stopped as they began reading articles, including the one about two Milwaukee men divorcing their wives for refusing to cook for them. They studied the photos, too, and loved the one showing Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig very much alive at a charity event.

But it was the spread on young Hubert that grabbed hold of Sally's curiosity and wouldn't let go.

She decided to track him down, which would inevitably lead to the moment where she'd have to say something like, "You don't know me, and I'm not crazy, but I was just noticing your picture in the paper 72 years ago. How did your life turn out, and would you mind telling me if you still have both lungs?"

Sally was dumbfounded by a comment Hubert's mother made to the reporter: "He wanted to smoke, so we let him. We thought he'd get sick when he first smoked, but he fooled us. He'd rather smoke than eat candy or ice cream."

The boy spoke of trying to quit because he wanted to be a baseball player or a boxer when he grew up and make a lot of money so he could buy new shoes for himself and a better house for Mom.

Sally contacted me about her find and asked for help locating Hubert all these years later. An Internet people-finding site showed there is a Hubert Albert living in Lac du Flambeau in northern Wisconsin. It said he was born in 1927, so that matched up.

Sally wrote him a letter and explained her interest. "Do we have the correct Hubert Albert? Please let us know. We are really curious to find out what happened to that spunky little boy in the article."

A few days later, she received a call from Hubert's wife, Donna. Yes, she had the right guy, and he was delighted she found him.

"It was a shocker," Hubert said when I called to ask about this unexpected blast from his smoky past. They opened the letter from Sally and saw the copy of the article she had enclosed. "That's funny," he said. "That looks like me."

Hubert, who never much liked that name, said everyone calls him Hutch. He was too young to remember it now, but he was smoking when other tots were teething.

His uncles would come over to his house on N. 12th St., and he began finishing their cigarettes once they burned down close to the butt. "In those days, no one worried about cancer," he said.

Word got around, and pretty soon everyone was offering him cigarettes. By about age 9, he was rolling his own. He received a pipe as a gift from a doctor the family knew. He still has it.

He kicked the habit around age 10 but took it up again when he joined the Merchant Marines at age 16. He smoked on and off throughout his life and even now enjoys packing his pipe a few times a day.

And the baseball and boxing dream? It didn't quite work out. He played a little baseball in the Army over in Japan, and he hung up the boxing gloves after taking a nasty beating in his third fight. But he became a pretty decent bowler.

He bought plenty of new shoes over the years, but not the house for Mom."

JS Online

Thanks, John L -- that's a cool story. The writer doesn't seem like an anti, and the woman who found the picture doesn't either. Neat!