COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:Event for those who like to light up

Do you smoke cigars? I don’t. Well, not often anyway. I have been known to try one now and then, usually at a cigar-themed event. It just so happens that the mother, or perhaps the father, of cigar fests is this Friday, Aug. 3, at the Balboa Bay Club — the Great Gentlemen’s Smoker & Lobster Clambake — another of the high-energy, high-style bashes that are the specialty of the Bay Club’s generalissimo, Henry Schielein. Yes, the “gentlemen’s smoker” part is a little politically incorrect, but women are of course welcomed with enthusiasm, though there’s no denying it’s pretty much a guy thing.

The evening, which has become an annual summer tradition, is a first-cabin whirl of fine wines, great food and more premium cigars than Winston Churchill could ever smoke, which is a lot. But just because it’s fun doesn’t mean it isn’t for a good cause. The event raises thousands of dollars for the Bay Club’s 1221 Club Scholarship Fund, which benefits students from Newport-Mesa schools.

Speaking of history class, not that we were, ever wonder where cigars come from, other than cigar stores? They were an invention of indigenous people in Latin America and the Caribbean, and you can find cigar smoking depicted in Mayan artwork as early as 900 A.D., which wasn’t yesterday. Do you know who introduced cigars to Europe? It was Christopher Columbus of all people. He said, “Europe, these are cigars. Cigars, this is Europe.”

Seriously, when Columbus and company landed at San Salvador in September 1492, the natives presented them with the best of their dried tobacco leaves as a gift. Columbus’ men accepted the aromatic leaves, said thanks, but had no idea what they were. Two months later, Columbus’ journal shows that two of his men, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, went ashore in Cuba and met natives who offered them puffs of tobacco leaves wrapped in corn husks, “...in the manner of a musket formed of paper.” I guess cigars were a lot bigger in 1492. De Jerez brought cigars and the smoking thereof back to Spain when he returned home.

It was a bumpy start for de Jerez’s newfound career as a cigar maker back in Spain, however. He became a target of the Spanish Inquisition and was condemned for “sinful and infernal” habits, including this odd business of rolling up tobacco leaves, setting them on fire, sticking them in your mouth and sucking on them. De Jerez was imprisoned for seven years, and by the time he was released, cigars, ironically, had taken Europe by storm.

But as early as the 15th century, Cuba was large and in charge when it came to cigars. Their tobacco and their cigar makers were the gold standard for cigar aficionados Since the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba was enacted in 1961, cigar lovers in this country have lamented the scheming they have to do to get their hands on true Cuban cigars, although the Internet has made all that much easier.

Famous cigar smokers? The list is endless. There was a time, before smoking became the pariah it is today, when world leaders were as likely to have a cigar in their hand as a pen, like Churchill, Stalin and U.S. presidents by the boatload, none more than Ulysses Grant.

Sigmund Freud and Mark Twain said they couldn’t work without a cigar, and cigars were a trademark of comedians like George Burns, Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, Bill Cosby and Ernie Kovacs. There are enthusiastic female cigar smokers, including not surprisingly a few Hollywood notables, like Demi Moore and Sharon Stone.

And finally, there is that old saw that what America needs is a good five-cent cigar, which I never understood then and still don’t now.

So that’s it then. If you think you’d enjoy pretending to be Winston Churchill or Demi Moore for a night, call the Balboa Bay Club at (949) 645-5000 and they will tell you everything you need to know about gentlemen, cigars, clambakes, Cubans and Christopher Columbus. OK, maybe not the last one but they know everything else. And if you show up with one of those musket-sized cigars, be careful where you light that thing.

I gotta go.