They called it the boob tube or the idiot box back in the sixties, but with the 21st-century flat screen its more like a window than a tube, and it's also not quite as dumb as it used to be
You may recall, in the 1970s Virginia Slims had the liberated woman angle, Marlboro had the cowboy angle, Benson & Hedges had the quirky humor angle, and Newport had the subliminal sex angle
In the postwar period, cigarettes were considered a valuable commodity used as currency
Until recently, Utah and Minnesota were the only states where merchants in significant numbers were fined for illegal tobacco sales to kids
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard historian, compares Jones to such great American innovators as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Bill Gates