Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 18, 1993 TAG: 9301180339
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Monty Leitch
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
ASTHMA SUFFERER FIGHTS BACK
UNTIL 1911, a boys' school operated in the old brick buildings of what is now St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital in Radford. George W. Miles founded St. Albans School on Sept. 19, 1892, with 22 boys in attendance.Professor Miles had taught for 10 years at Emory & Henry College before launching his ambitious project, but his school is remembered more for its athletic teams than its academics. Its yearbooks include (decidedly partisan) play-by-play accounts of every baseball and football game ever played there.
Apparently some parents expressed doubts about football's value in the development of young men, because the 1896-97 yearbook includes a lengthy article defending football's attributes, authored by "G.W.M." - no doubt the good professor himself.
"It is a dangerous sport," the article begins. "Yes, it is dangerous to be alive. In that sense, and chiefly in that sense, is football dangerous." But when football's "winnowing process" is completed, when the "hoodlums, rowdies, and toughs" have been completely eliminated from the game, then football "will have done its part to draw the line between the gentlemen and those who can lay no claim to the title . . .."
In particular, G.W.M. promises, football will annihilate "the society dude and the cigarette worm," because it's "suited to high-minded, generous, self-respecting boys" and not to those "feeble, nervous men today in our country who would be sweeter-tempered to their wives and more useful to their country and their Church, if they had been rolled in the dust of the football field when growing boys."
I particularly like the term "cigarette worm." It's vivid and descriptive, don't you think? Even apart from football.
It came to mind the other day when the Environmental Protection Agency officially classified second-hand tobacco smoke among serious cancer and health threats. "The risks associated with environmental tobacco smoke are at least an order of magnitude greater than they are for virtually any chemical or risk that EPA regulates," EPA Administrator William Reilly reported.
I'm asthmatic. Every four hours, I inhale medications from two little metal cannisters that I never risk traveling without. If I forget to watch the clock, my lungs remind me also to take a couple of medications in pill form. I catch every cold that goes around and usually the flu, despite flu shots, so I lie around in misery a lot. And I can whiff a cigarette worm at a hundred yards on a still day; my wheezing's a dead-on clue.
If you'll pardon my French, it's about damn time someone did something about second-hand cigarette smoke.
About one in five Americans suffers from allergic disease. That's around 50 million of us. Consequently, asthma and allergies are the most common chronic diseases in this country, costing more lost work and school days than any other illness. Talk about your economic impact.
By the way, asthma also causes around 4,000 deaths in the United States each year.
So don't try to convince me that cigarette worms have rights. And don't try to convince me, either, that this country needs the tobacco industry.
I live with asthma and I'm grateful for the drugs that make that possible. But I'd given anything - anything - for healthy lungs. You cigarette worms who're letting tobacco eat away at your own lungs and your children's lungs - lungs that were born healthy - might give me a thought the next time you light up. For a really good time, try asthma.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.