Tobacco played a big role at my first journalism job. It also is our focus for this month’s cover story. For my college summers and for a while after graduation, I was a reporter and photographer for a small daily newspaper in Washington, N.C. Little Washington (so named to differentiate it from the nation’s capital, as if that were necessary) is a pretty little town on the brackish Pamlico River. The editor there, Ashley B. Futrell, who still writes editorials at age 89, gave me lots of work and the freedom to make mistakes. It was a tremendous learning experience.

Back then, during the early 1970s, King Tobacco still reigned. The leaf was my beat. Washington is on the eastern fringe of the vast North Carolina flue-cured belt. I covered everything from tobacco barn fires, caused when sticks of leaf curing in old-fashioned barns fell on hot flues, to the biggest day in Little Washington’s economic calendar – the opening of the tobacco auction.

We on the Daily News staff hated opening day. It meant putting out a 56-page supplement. That meant lots of extra work on meager salaries. We’d slave away getting pictures of the pungent-scented bales lying row after row in Little Washington’s four cavernous warehouses. We wracked our brains coming up with every conceivable angle about tobacco. The opening of the auction unleashed a flood of money. Farmers began paying off loans. Whatever extra they had led to Main Street shopping sprees. To help them, the newspapers ran pages of ads. It had been like this for years.

Not any more. All four auction houses are shut down, the closest ones now being 20 miles away in Greenville. Many in the business are in denial, but tobacco is on its way out. As health concerns intensify, domestic smoking is declining. There were 188,650 tobacco farms in the U.S. in 1978. By 1997, the number had declined to 89,700. If contract buying replaces tobacco quotas, there will be even fewer farms. More product is being grown in China and Zimbabwe.

Even though smoking is bad, it’s sad to see the culture vanish. Tobacco-growing communities have few economic alternatives. What’s even sadder, though, is that tobacco’s demise has been coming since 1965 when the Surgeon General linked smoking with lung cancer. That was a long time ago, and still very little has been done to prepare for tobacco’s transition either here in Virginia or down in Little Washington.