Like Obama, some Craven County leaders struggled to stop smoking

President Barack Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act into law this week. He also talked about his own struggle to kick the habit. A look around New Bern and Craven County shows that many local leaders have had the same struggle.

The new law particularly aims to curb smoking's appeal to children. It allows the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to reduce the amount of nicotine in tobacco products, ban candy flavorings that appeal to children and block labels such "low tar" and "light." And while the law doesn't ban nicotine outright, it does allow the FDA to regulate what goes into tobacco products, and to prohibit marketing campaigns aimed at children.

Obama called the regulation "a law that will save American lives." And yet, Obama has said he still battles the urge to light up.

Many of the leaders in New Bern and Craven County say they have fought the same battle, but today they are smoke-free.  A few others said that even though they live in a state where tobacco is a top crop, they have never wanted to take a drag.

‘It seemed like the thing to do ...'

Mayor Tom Bayliss, who grew up on a tobacco farm, is pretty sure the urge to smoke was somewhere in his blood.

He can remember riding in his  family's 1955 Bel-Air Chevrolet, windows rolled up to block the rain, while his parents smoked Lucky Strikes.

"Daddy, Mama, everybody I knew smoked," Bayliss said. "And when they smoked with the windows rolled up, we were all smoking whether we wanted to or not. It just seemed like the thing to do, because everybody I knew did it."

Alderman Max Freeze picked up the habit early, too, choosing paths that would put him that put him in both the entertainment business and the news business.

"You don't really pick that combination when I did and not end up smoking," he said. "When I was working, I could kill two packs a day."

Freeze started smoking when he was 15, and kept it up until he was 32. His fellow aldermen, Julius Parham and Robert Raynor, both picked up the habit in high school.

So did Commissioner Steve Tyson. Commissioners Theron McCabe and Johnnie Sampson also started young, but quit a long time ago.

"In my age group, it was kind of the norm to smoke," Tyson said. "My parents smoked and the vast majority of the people at a party were smoking. It sort of meant it was OK to smoke."

Parham echoed that.

"You know, it was a big thing," he said. "It's what the cool kids did."

Parham smoked for 17 years before he quit in 1990.

He started smoking again in 1996.

And quit again in 2003.

"That's why I gained weight," he said, laughing. "It's hard, man. It's hard to give up, even when you know it isn't good for you."

Kicking the habit

It took health scares to get Freeze and Raynor to kick butts.

Freeze had bladder cancer when he was in his 30s, and his doctor, a smoker himself, told him that while the Winstons probably didn't cause it, laying off them "wouldn't hurt."

When that doctor died of lung cancer a month later, Freeze decided to heed his advice.

"I was working in radio in Fayetteville at the time," he said. "I laid the cigarettes on the control board and said I'd try to go 10 minutes without them. I made it to the end of my shift. ... I've been doing without them ever since, 10 minutes at a time."

Raynor, who had developed a steady diet of coffee and cigarettes in law school, remembers the morning he woke to feel that his throat was "almost literally on fire."  

"I prayed, ‘Lord, get me through this OK, and I promise you won't ever have to worry about me smoking again," Raynor said. "He did, and I stopped cold."

Commissioner Lee Kyle Allen remembers down to the minute when he, too, stopped cold.

"I stopped Dec. 15, 1992, about 3:30 in the afternoon," he said. "I had a heart attack."

Some leaders never lit up

Commissioner Perry Morris and Alderman Dana Outlaw have never smoked, despite being born and raised in Eastern North Carolina.

Neither has Linda Thomas, the Craven County Board of Education member who grew up on a tobacco farm.

"I never acquired the habit," she said. "I never felt it was good for my health, and I just had the training that it was not the right thing to do."

Morris kept it simple in explaining where he stood: "Never smoked. Never chewed. Never dipped.  Never used any tobacco products," he said. "Neither did my parents."

Outlaw says he is "saving my lungs for when I'm older."

School Board Chairman Carr Ipock said he doesn't think any of the people on his board smoke.

"I certainly don't, and am not aware of others that do," Ipock said. "For quite some time, we've been a tobacco-free schools and facilities system, and that was, we felt, ... an important step for student health," he added.

The beginning of an ‘all-out ban?'

Commissioners' Chairman Jason Jones has never smoked, either. But as a farmer, he worries about the long-term effects of this newest legislation. It's something that he believes should worry North Carolina and all other tobacco-producing states.

"I have never smoked," he said. "But taking off my hat as a county commissioner and putting on my hat as president of Craven County Farm Bureau, we are against this legislation.  We do not feel the federal government should have the authority to regulate tobacco and are scared about the end result, whether there will be an all-out ban."

Many of the leaders who have given up smoking said that the choice to do that has to be an individual one.

"You know, it was hard for me to quit, but I finally did it," Bayliss said. "I wouldn't take a thousand dollars to smoke now. For me, it was an economic thing, a savings account. If you want to do it, you've got to find your own inspiration."

Nikie Mayo can be reached at (252) 635-5665 or nmayo@freedomenc.com. Sun Journal staff members Sue Book and Laura Oleniacz contributed to this story.