Good Smoke

By Vince Basehart

January 11 -- Do not be alarmed by the smoke billowing from the tiny Tudor-style cottage on Wilshire. That's just good tobacco smoke. And that cottage is the original Tinder Box, the unabashedly old fashioned pipe shop which has been there since just after World War II.

On most days, particularly early Saturday, the place is packed with men puffing pipes and sipping cigars in probably the only establishment left in Santa Monica where the vice is not prohibited. There is a clubby feel to it on weekends: even a pink box of doughnuts is set out on a table like at a church social.

You get the sense these men are getting away from their wives. Or were kicked out by them.

The interior of the shop looks like a collision between "David Copperfield" and "Our Man in Havana." It houses a discordant array of English briar pipes, carved meerschaums, big crook-necked ones, and smiling Toby mugs, intermixed with sleek ashtrays and cigar cutters, and odds and ends with names like Montecristo, Habana, Sol Cubano, Maduro.

The place is jammed with canisters of tobacco of course, and enough cigars for an army of Fidels.

Every inch of wall space is taken up by antique shotguns and swords, old photographs. Small, polished cedar humidors are on display. Cases overflow with pipe cleaners, tobacco pouches and small pocket knives. It's the kind of place where you can find elegant lighters and leather-covered flasks.

If the old English meets Cuba vibe, along with cars whooshing by on Wilshire Boulevard all seems a bit Wonderland, it's appropriate. The business has been supplying props to Hollywood since the Golden Age.

The next time you see Marlena Dietrich light up, there's a good chance the studio picked up her rhinestone-studded cigarette holder from Mr. Kolpin's store. Photos of Brando, Peck and Crosby smile down at you.

The Lens was the only patron on a recent afternoon visit. Brigido Anaya, the contemplative pipe-smoking counterman with long salt and pepper hair, greeted me.

As I plucked specimens from a box of Camacho torpedoes in the giant walk-in humidor at the back of the establishment, I heard Mr. Anaya's side of the following conversation with a young woman, unseen by me:

“This is not that kind of shop. We have cigars and pipes and ashtrays and such.”

The young woman's unintelligible something.

“You mean to smoke something other than tobacco? No ma'am. You need to go to a different kind of store for that. This is a gentleman’s smoke shop,” was Mr. Anaya's polite, butlerish response.

Indeed, it is a gentleman’s shop. It’s as close as I can (and probably in reality would ever want) to get to my fantasy of the gentlemans’ clubs of yore, the kind with wood paneled walls, leather club chairs, and tycoons in spats carving up the world economy over stogies and Scotch.

The business was started in 1928 by Edward Kolpin, who passed away just this past April at 97 years of age. An early, framed black and white photo of the founder shows him cradling a black dog. In it he looks like a young Walt Disney. In another, later photo, he is white-haired and grandfatherly looking, smiling at the camera with pipe in hand.

This past summer I pulled the Lensmobile onto the crumbling parking lot behind the store. One of the proprietors was coming out, locking up for the evening. He saw me back away but he insisted I come in. He reopened the store and patiently helped me with my selection.

Rather than firing up the closed register, he simply handed me a small piece of paper upon which he had jotted down the cost for my fistful of cigars. "Pay us next time you drop by," he said.

Dumbfounded, I mumbled about such trust being so rare nowadays.

"You look like a trustworthy gentleman," he said.