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An Interview with Stanford Newman
Chairman, J.C. Newman Cigar Co., Tampa, Florida, the owners of Cuesta-Rey and Diamond Crown cigars.
Marvin R. Shanken
From the Print Edition:
Claudia Schiffer, Jul/Aug 97
(continued from page 29)
In a comprehensive interview with Marvin R. Shanken, editor and publisher of Cigar Aficionado, Newman reminisces about the cigar industry, and offers his impressions of the impact of today's cigar boom.
Cigar Aficionado: Tell us about the cigar industry in
America at the turn of the century.
Newman: My father started in business in 1895. He was a
journeyman and cigarmaker. He learned to make cigars by hand. His
mother paid $3 a month for three years for an apprenticeship, and he
finally became a journeyman. He worked for a factory for six months
and it went out of business.
CA: Where was this?
Newman: In Cleveland, Ohio. My father came from
Austria-Hungary in 1888 with his family and he had five brothers. Each
brother learned a trade. My father decided to become a cigarmaker, and
he learned to make cigars by hand. After he lost his job, his mother
got him an order for cigars from a grocer where she used to shop. Now,
at that time, there were few brands; most cigars were
generics. The grocer gave my father an order for 500 cigars and he
started from there making his own cigars. He finally got an order for
5,000 cigars from a wholesale grocer who also distributed
cigars. Suddenly, he had to make a lot more cigars, so he got two or
three of his buddies together and they started in.
CA: At that time, how big or how important was the cigar
industry in the United States?
Newman: Remember that all cigars were made by hand, and
there were over 40,000 cigars factories in 1895 across the country. In
fact, those 40,000 had federal licences. It makes sense. It took very
little capital to get into the cigar business. A person could go into
manufacturing cigars with 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 dollars. In all the major
cities in the United States, there were cigar dealers, wholesalers
that sold tobacco by the pound.
CA: Let me go back a second. Why did the federal government
license cigar manufacturers? You didn't need a federal license to make
dresses or shoes, or to sell groceries. Why cigars?
Newman: The federal government wanted to collect taxes on
cigars. At that time, you had to go to the post office and buy stamps
to put them on cigars boxes, whether they were boxes of 10, 25 or
50. You put them on the boxes and you sold the boxes. But you couldn't
sell the box of cigars at all unless it had a stamp on it.
CA: How big was the cigar industry in terms of the number
of cigars produced and sold at the turn of the century?
Newman: The cigar market was probably perhaps two or three
billion. At the height of the 1920s, I think there were nine to 10
billion.
CA: How were the cigars sold? If there were that many
factories, were there even more cigar stores?
Newman: No, there weren't very many. There was usually one
or two in each city that were exclusive cigar shops. Most of the
cigars were sold through grocery stores. There were not any real cigar
distributors at that time. All the wholesale grocers that supplied
grocery stores handled tobacco products. There weren't any cigar
jobbers probably until maybe in the '20s.
CA: Later on, in the '40s or '50s, there was a huge boom in
cigar stores.
Newman: Yes. When I grew up in the '20s and the '30s, there
were two chains. The biggest was United Cigar Stores. They had 800
stores. They went into every major city. And in every major city in
the United States, they'd tried to get a downtown corner. There was
another one called Schulte Cigar Stores.
CA: When was the retail trade at its peak?
Newman: Remember that the outlets were a lot different than
today's cigar stores. They were on the corners in the best traffic
patterns of the community. Most of them established themselves as
cut-rate stores. They gave out coupons, especially the United Cigar
Stores, which attracted a lot of people. Eventually, in the late '40s,
the rents just got too high for most of them because it was hard to
make money. The basis of their business was cut-rate cigarettes, pipe
tobacco, chewing tobacco; and cigars were less and less dominant.
CA: Earlier, you said that all the cigars at the turn of
the century were handmade. When did the transition to machine-made
cigars take place?
Newman: Let me go back a little here, too. There was a man
by the name of J.B. Duke who put all the cigarette companies
together. He also purchased and bought every machine that was ever
patented to make cigarettes. He formed the American Tobacco Co.
In 1911, Teddy Roosevelt, who was a trust-buster, broke up the
cigarette companies. That's when companies like United States Tobacco
were started, and their business was the snuff or chewing tobacco
business. The American Tobacco Co. had all the cigarette machinery,
and they started making a cigar-rolling machine. My father bought some
of the first machines that the company put out in about 1915. My
father had one factory that he opened using machines exclusively to
make cigars. You know, cigarettes weren't that popular at the time. It
was during World War I that the cigarette companies gave out millions
of packs of cigarettes to the Red Cross and they became apart of the
rations pack. So, when [the soldiers] came back they smoked
cigarettes, not cigars. At the time, my father had three factories,
and he had to close two of them because none of the new smokers wanted
to smoke cigars.
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