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Alfons Mayer Dies
Posted: Thursday, October 12, 2006
By David Savona
The cigar and tobacco industry lost one of its most influential men on Wedesday when Alfons Mayer died following a short battle with brain cancer. He was 79 years old.
Mayer, the longtime tobacco buyer for General Cigar Co., had spent a lifetime studying and mastering tobacco. He bought leaf from all corners of the world. Among his biggest jobs was buying enough tobacco to make the tens of millions of Macanudo and Partagas cigars crafted by hand each year.
Born to a family with roots in the tobacco business, Mayer learned his trade from the ground floor. He visited his first tobacco field in Cuba in 1952, where he worked as an apprentice for five years. "Work until the cows come home!" he said in a Cigar Aficionado interview in 2005, describing his apprenticeship. "We kept on moving [tobacco] bales all the time. My hands were open, bloody."
A lifelong packrat, Mayer took diligent notes on all that he learned while in Cuba. During an interview in early 2005, he went to a stuffed file cabinet, removed a well-worn notebook, and showed off the neatly written words he had penciled in more than 50 years ago.
He spent 46 years in the tobacco industry, and worked for General Cigar from 1961 until his retirement in 2001. He was with Angel Daniel Núñez when the two men found an aged crop of Cameroon tobacco in a Spain warehouse that would become the wrapper for the Partagas 150 and, later, the Partagas 160 cigar.
"I was fortunate to have met Alfons in 1978 as my career in the tobacco industry was still in its beginnings," said Núñez, now the president and chief operating officer of General. "I was lucky to have been able to work with him because the knowledge he shared helped to give my career a solid foundation. Whatever I am today, I am because I built upon what I learned from Alfons. For him, tobacco was everything."
"Alfons was a legend. His knowledge of tobacco was unmatched," said Edgar M. Cullman Sr., the former chairman of General Cigar. "He loved to buy tobacco, he loved to feel tobacco, he loved to smoke tobacco, he was Mr. Tobacco. We all learned from him and we all were better cigar people because of his knowledge. The great thing about Alfons was that he knew tobaccos from all over the world and was able to use those tobaccos in the blends that reflected the many tastes of smokers. He was the complete tobacco man."
After retiring from General, Mayer lived a lifelong dream by launching his own cigar brand bearing his name. Alfons Mayer cigars, which are made by General, come in three sizes, called Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, and are on sale at one of his favorite night spots, Club Macanudo in New York City.
Funeral services will be held today and Saturday in New Jersey.
To read about Mayer’s intriguing life in his own words, read the August 2005 Q&A, “The Silent Legend.” For more on Mayer and his life, see Tuesday’s Cigar Insider.
Photo by Brennan Cavanaugh
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