The Pipe

Sometime in the 1960s, before my family moved to Northern California, Dad found a walnut tree washed up on a beach in Southern California. The tree was shaped like a smoking pipe, and Dad brought it home. After carefully cleaning the piece of driftwood, he gave it a light stain, then painted it with shellac. My earliest memory of the pipe is as a toddler when it was sitting in our front yard on Alamo Street in Simi Valley. It was a light tan color, and the shellac was peeling. Dad regretted the shellac and was letting the outdoor weather remove it.

When I was five years old, the pipe moved with us to Newbury Park. There, Dad took it into his new shop in the garage and went to work on it. He removed the last of the shellac and drilled a hole the entire length of the trunk. To do this, he had to get drill bit extensions. About two-thirds of the way down the trunk, he drilled into a knot hole to complete the job. Once the trunk was bored out, he lined it with copper tubing. He manufactured a tiny pipe bowl and soldered that on the end of the copper tubing. He saved all the sawdust and mixed it with wood glue to manufacture the curved section at the top and the giant mouthpiece. The copper tubing inside the mouthpiece is threaded to accommodate a human-sized mouthpiece (long lost). He stained it a dark “walnut” brown.

The pipe was never intended for tobacco; it was Dad’s hash pipe. In the 1970s, this fact was not advertised, especially not around Grandma and Grandpa Rodriquez. Dad submitted a picture of his 6-foot-tall creation to the Guinness Book of World Records simply as a “smoking pipe,” but they sent a letter back stating that there was no competition for it. 

Before the move north somehow, Dad got in touch with Hugh Hefner to see if he would buy it. Hugh liked the pipe and took it home to “think about it”. (I don’t know what Dad’s asking price was). It resided at the Playboy Mansion for about two years. Dad finally demanded that Mr. Hefner either buy it or give it back. He gave it back. We were living in the Kanaka Club at the time, so it must have been around 1977. Dad had to make a special trip to Southern California to retrieve his pipe. It was returned with an aluminum placard that Hugh had attached to the base, inscribed: “By Donald Bell”.

Something that Dad did not anticipate was the fact that smoking hash would eventually clog the pipe. He tried to clean it with a piano wire with minimal success. It was smoked one or two times after that but has functioned solely as a piece of art for about 40 years now. Dad willed the pipe to my brother DBJ, and DBJ gave it to his son Jeremiah. It is currently housed at the Underground Gold Miners Museum in Alleghany. Many visitors take their photo with it. Not something that you see every day!

The author can be reached at: raebell44@gmail.com