Non-smokers in the 1970s and 1980s, how the hell did you survive the second hand smoke?

You didn’t. As a child you got sick a lot with respiratory illnesses and ear infections, and you went to school reeking of cigs. But you didn’t realize it because you were surrounded by it. The quality of what you ate was often not as good either, because your parents couldn’t taste their food. And we’re probably still dealing with the long term health effects without knowing it.

It’s also fun whe you have to scrape the nicotine stains off the windows and scrub the walls when you finally sell your parents home.

You grew up in it and didn't notice.

But after the bans the first thing that stood out is you don't need to bleach every piece of fabric you took outside every day. The first time I went out, woke up the next day and my clothes didn't smell... you know, smoky I was very confused. Up until that point I assumed that was just what happened to dirty clothes, I didn't realize it was all the cigarettes.

Being a non-smoker back then was a giant pain-in-the-ass at any workplace too because any smoker could and would take a break for a cigarette once an hour and then so would the manager and they'd get to be buddies but if you were known as a non-smoker you didn't get a break because you "didn't need one" I knew dozens of people, especially in healthcare, who took up smoking because that was the time to be social with each other and the managers.

Growing up in the 1960s, my father was a chainsmoker. I never noticed. It was the water that little fish me swam in.

He quit when I was, I dunno, maybe 12 or 13. Suddenly, I noticed tobacco smoke when I encountered it, and it was revolting. I deeply resented having to work in an office in the 1980s that allowed smoking. I deeply resented restaurants with “smoking sections” that were just a half-wall separating me and smokers. I hated flying, with the stench from the “smoking section” filling my air.

How did I survive? Resentfully.

I grew up in the 80's / early 90s when smoking indoors was still common (restaurants, buses, etc). You just kind of got used to it.

Eventually I started smoking, and it was less of a bother 😆 (have since quit).

The thing I never could figure out, even as a smoker, was how people smoked in a car with the windows rolled up. It was unbearable even being the one smoking. Even in the dead of winter and negative one million degrees outside, I always had to have a window cracked.

My sister and I were wee little ones who one week brought home scads of stuff given to us by our school from the American Cancer society. We went running up to our dad screaming "We don't want you to die daddy!" with all that childish exuberance, and he quit cold turkey the next day.

Ask my asthma. I dunno if there's direct causation but being exposed to cigarette smoke from infancy damn sure didn't help.

Ha, I remember being a kid. I would be with my parents at a campground all Summer. We had a fairly small trailer. I remember one night there was a NFL(Patriots) game on and my parents and another couple were in the trailer watching. There was so much smoke that I felt like I was going to die.

I ended up screaming at them all. I think they were actually shocked at how angry and loud I screamed. They didn't say a word. Turned off the TV, took a few things and left the trailer. They even made sure to keep the door open so the air would vent through the screen door.

My father died of lung cancer less than 10 years later in '89.

I think one thing a lot of people don't know now is that back then there was a WHOLE LOT of denial about the detrimental effects of smoking. I think this was mostly the tobacco industry's propaganda, but it worked. I remember talking with someone in the 90s that had some sort of cancer and had been a smoker most of his life. "No way to know if it was the cigarettes" that caused the cancer, he told me.

We are much, much more aware of the downsides of smoking now. The cat is out of the bag.

You are talking to the survivors.

I grew up in a small town, and when I was 17, I signed up for the volunteer fire department in town. Part of the in-processing was getting a chest x-ray so they knew how fucked your lungs were before any exposure related to the position. Nurse asked me how much I smoked and thought I was lying when I (truthfully) said I didn't. She said my lungs looked like I'd been smoking at least a pack a day for at least a year.

My mom and every step-dad smoked like chimneys, spent a lot of my childhood in bars when smoking indoors was still legal. I don't know if the nurse was exaggerating the results, and I don't have a copy of the x-ray from back then. I also picked up the habit myself around 20 in the military and smoked a pack to 2 a day until we found out my wife was pregnant with our first kid. We both quit cold turkey that day. I assume I'll have lung or skin cancer at some point between all that childhood exposure, the damage I did to myself smoking for a decade, the aircraft fumes, and burn pit exposure from the military...and we didn't worry about sunscreen like we should have in the 80s/90s either.

Childhood asthma, unfortunately. I was born in 1982 and basically everyone smoked everywhere here in the Netherlands. If you had a birthday, you couldn’t see across the room due to the smoke.

Because of it I had childhood asthma, which cleared up immediately when my parents stopped smoking. In the early 90’s, things got a lot better with smoke-free environments. We eventually got full on smoking bans, thank god. As far as I can tell, it didn’t do any permanent damage.

I still absolutely HATE smokers and smoking. It is and was an antisocial thing and children should never have been exposed to it like we were.

It really sucked when people could smoke anywhere. I remember so many times when I was at a restaurant just starting into a nice meal and suddenly all I could smell or taste was cigarette (or cigar) smoke. It was gross.

I also remember when airlines had a smoking section, which was usually the back several rows. I remember asking for a seat in the non-smoking section, and the one I got was one row in front of the smoking section; there was probably more smoke there than in the last row of the smoking section.

You washed your clothes a lot. And even worse for girls with long hair.

You would skip restaurants during busy times.

Sometimes you would carry an extra jacket in your car trunk to put on when going into a smokey place, so you could take it off and hopefully not have too much smoke smell on you if you weren't going to shower soon.

My family smoked like chimneys. I closed myself in my bedroom and avoided un-necessary contact.

Great grandmother got emphysema and died.
Great grandfather got throat cancer, a tracheotomy, and died.
Grandfather got lung cancer and died.
Mom got cancer and survived.
Dad had a massive heart attack and died.

Man, it was rough.

At family friends you'd take a break to get some fresh air or a bathroom break, as they smoked indoors and you had to be nice.

At restaurants I would push my parents for non smoking. One time they skipped that option and it impacted me so much I threw up all over the back seat.

They no longer opted for the smoking section ever again.

A lot of people didn’t.

God only knows how. Any time I went somewhere with my parents the car windows were up, the aircon was off and they were both chain smoking.

They both died of smoking-related illnesses.

90's kid with smoker parents. You made do with the migraines. It was the absolute worst in winter car rides on bright days. Blinding snow plus second hand smoke migraine and no rolling down the window more than a tiny crack. Pure hell.

Workplaces were the worst, I kept catching other people's second hand smoke at work. Worst was when I went to an encounter group type thing and a guy was smoking and I got a faceful.... and bronchitis for the rest of the trip. And that was in the 90's

At least in my own home and car I could set the rules and rules was take that shit outside

We just sat in the non-smoking section.

Cigarette smoke is very clever and is sure to respect a small piece of red rope strung across the restaurant.

And the real answer is we were all just used to the smell of cigarettes. Going for a meal or going to see grandad? Put on some old clothes that can be put in the washing when you come home because they'll stink. It never seemed to occur to anyone that they could just stop letting people smoke indoors.

Even if it's not the 70s or 80s, I still grew up with lots of second hand smoke in the 90s. Once a year my village had a little comedy thing (german carnival) for one evening in the local gym. You couldn't see the stage after the first hour if you were like 10m away from the stage. It didn't matter, smoking, drinking and just a little music and everybody was happy. And it was the same in every restaurant or subway station. It just felt normal, it smelled the same no matter where you went and everybody smelled like cold smoke. After it got shut down in quiet a rush, the new normal came so quickly, that even today nobody can believe how it was just 20-25 years ago.

Dude my parents chain smoked every day in a poorly ventilated mobile home. It was everywhere and we became noseblind unless it was directly wafting in our face (yuck). When I moved out everything was so much better. I was so happy to be able to breathe and not stink, however, I also left the house addicted to nicotine despite never having smoked myself.

I'm strongly suspicious that some of my current health problems might be tied to second hand smoke.

Edit: one thing I did to get around it was wash my clothes so that I'd have an outfit in the dryer (protected from smoke) to put on in the morning. Combined with morning showers I hope I didn't smell that much.

You really did get used to it in the sense that I don't remember it making me sick to be around it(my parents, aunt and grandma all smoked around me from birth to about 14 when I was diagnosed with asthma). But now if I'm around any cigarette smoke at all I'm sick for at least a week (congestion, cough, sinus shit) and I don't know how I rode in a car as a child with 4 adults ripping butts. Disgusting.

My father gets headaches if he’s around smoke for more than a few minutes. One thing this lead to is avoiding restaurants at peak hours. So when I was a kid if we ate out we always went at 11;00 for lunch or about 5:00 for dinner. The idea was to be out before the people in the smoking section had time to light up their after meal cig. Of course occasionally you’d get the before meal cig too.

But as a result even 20 years after smoking in restaurants was banned where I live all of my family is in the habit of eating early.

We were just used to it, even as non-smokers. I grew up with my Dad always smoking and just always recognized the smell, but it was just so common that I didn't think anything of it. It wasn't until my state banned indoor smoking that it really hit me how everpresent it had been. It was like a few weeks after the ban went into effect that I really noticed it like, "Holy shit, I never realized how much I hate that smoke, it's so much better now!" I was working at a bar/restaurant at the time, so it just cleared the fucking place up and I was so happy.

It was so normalized you didn't really notice or think about it, or at least I didn't. It was just a thing you suffered through.

Well at that age I was a baby so I was mostly close to the floor

So when you were like 8 years old and you went into the bathroom at 2 in the morning and saw your parents' cigarettes you might try one out and wonder what was wrong with them.

We couldn't go anywhere. This continued well into the 2000s when I was a kid, and I had (mild) asthma. We only went out to eat when it was warm enough to sit outside, and I only ever went to take your kid to work day once.

Oh, and I remember riding in the back sear of my grandmothers car when she lit up and cracked the window. I stuffed my head under her seat so I could breathe marginally cleaner air until we got wherever we were going.

If you didn't have asthma, it was just unpleasant and you put up with it. And probably burned your clothes after visiting a nursing home or bar.

Both my parents smoked in the 90's and I never really thought about it until I was like 12, by then it was being banned in many more places. I thought cars smelled weird that didn't reek of smoke. I also sometimes smelled of smoke and probably smelled more to people who were not around smokers. Being around smokers from 0 -18 knock on wood I haven't yet had been diagnosed with anything. Second hand smoke everyday. I never took it up, as we know its not good for you. But I dont mind being around smokers, brings a sort of nostalgia for me the second hand smoke that is.

So, I'm a bit younger than the era you're looking for, but my dad was an alcoholic and I remember as a kid being in the local bar and being juuuust short enough that I was just under the smoke line. I had to breach that line to get up on a bar stool and ask for a kitty cocktail. It always felt like I crossed the border to another world whenever I did.

I think I need to use more force to clear my lungs than my peers, but other than that my lack of athletic ability is mostly self inflicted.

It was disgusting. You could only deal with it. No choice. As soon as someone smoked, I noticed right away. I would get coughing fits if anyone smoked near me at a restaurant. In bars it was horrible. In one particular case my throat was feeling like it was burning due to how thick the cigarette smoke was in the bar. And all your clothes would smell and it reeked in your room or apartment for a couple of days until you cleaned them. I don't miss that time at all. I'm so glad smoking is banned everywhere now.

If only they would ban smoking in apartment or condo buildings next. It shouldn't be allowed when you live in close proximity to other people and your smoke gets into their home.

Both my parents smoked so I didn't notice it growing up. Once I went to college and got away from that environment I really started to notice it all around me. Nothing was worse than opening up the closet and smelling the smoke on the coat you wore the night before at a bar. Luckily, my county was an early adopter of non-smoking sections and eventually outright banning and that changed everything.

I had “childhood asthma” and had to carry around an inhaler.

The same way people survived “gardyloo!” days. When you’re surrounded by shit it probably didn’t seem quite as bad as it would to us today.

I didn’t like all the smoke as a kid, but it is more noticeable and horrible these days since it is much less common, in my view anyway.

Australian guy here

Didn't go out much and did lots of outdoor activities.. When I first started work it was allowed in work vehicles, that stopped after about 2 years.

Stillnallowed in lunch rooms etc.so I ate outside or at my desk. Did not go to restaurants etc becase of the smoking, flew on an Air France flight once from Miami to Paria and it had smoking, no escape, fuck that was bad, still remember it decades later :)

My Dad said it was shocking when he was working (he's long dead and would have been about 85 if we was still living, he was a non smoker)

Well I became a smoker myself (I quit in 2011) but even then I hated smoking indoors and never smoked in my apartment.

We bowled a lot

You can get a feel of it by being around a lot of fragrances. You know the people who are noseblind so wear a lot of perfume/cologne. They putting on fragrances in their lotions or other stuff. Their house and/or car reeks but they barely notice. Same feel and they don't even notice the smell, it normal to them. Their kids and pets are getting sick and they don't care. I forgot to add that you are considering the problem if you bring it up.

Oh god, the bowling alleys. The stink of cigarettes, soggy fried food, and machine oil that didn't just destroy your clothes, but actually permeated your soul.

Both of my parents smoked. My two brothers and I would take a pair of scissors and cut the cigarette in front of their faces when they would go and light up.

I don't remember how long it took to get them to quit, but they finally did.

It's just not the health aspect, but smoking is just absolutely disgusting. A smoker just stinks to high heaven and they make everything around them stink long after they leave. How they are not completely mortified by that, I will never know.

Then add the expense and the deleterious health impact.

It begs the question...

What the actual fuck?

My Grandpa had one of those full size Chevy conversion vans with a sofa/bed in the back. I have very specific memories of opening the back window vent which was a mesh screen, and sticking my face on it as a child so that I could breathe the outside fresh air rather than his smoke.

Loved that man, but that probably wasn't the best thing to expose a young child to every day.

Don't forget the smog and pot smoke. We grew gills back then.

That's the neat part - sometimes you didn't.

My dad would always smoke at home. It was what it was, standard in Greece at the time, so what could I do? Ask him not to smoke so I could get beaten up? So I survived by shutting up and leaving home after 18.

Same way we're doing smog?

Cigarette smoke was everywhere indoors, but the air outside was better than today (in Oregon anyway). And the air quality on planes was actually better before they banned smoking than after because the airlines immediately turned the expensive cabin air re-circulation way down.