Dayton Matlick has passed at age 88. He was far more influential than most suspect, and no one can estimate his full contributions to our hobby. He was a quiet man who did not talk about his accomplishments, but I often lunched with him and heard some stories.

If you don't recognize Dayton's name, he started Pipes and tobaccos magazine, which was published for more than 20 years and was the longest-running and arguably the highest-quality print consumer pipe magazine in history. He was the owner of SpecComm International, a small publishing company of about 60 employees dedicated mainly to the agricultural aspects of tobacco, and later branching into consumer and industry tobacco magazines.

He knew before he launched P&T that the history of pipe magazines was bleak. The few pipe publications of the 20th century typically failed within five years, often in less than one. Dayton decided to try it anyway. His friend Peter Stokkebye had proposed the idea of a new pipe magazine, and after significant thought and market research, Dayton made it happen.

He'd been promised advertising support by various companies before he launched the magazine, but the majority of those companies decided to wait (for years) to see if the publication was successful before committing, so Dayton relied on the cigar boom of that time to finance P&T. Early issues contained cigar ads, mainly purchased because of incentives for advertisers in Tobacconist, one of SpecComm's trade magazines that had expanded dramatically during the cigar boom.

Readers didn't appreciate those ads in P&T, and they complained. They were pipe people who didn't want their magazine diluted with other tobacco products, but those ads were paying the startup bills, so it was a unique balancing prospect. Dayton even published a cigar article in P&T, probably to encourage more cigar ads, but the reader backlash was profound. Within the first year, he accepted that P&T needed to be dedicated to pipes. Strangely, no one on staff smoked pipes. He needed to find an editor who was a pipe enthusiast.

I met him at the industry trade show just after the second issue of P&T was printed in 1996, and I proposed writing an article for the magazine. He said go ahead — if it's adequate, we might publish it. He didn't say it that way — he was, as always, polite and respectful, but that was the fundamental message. I submitted an article and was surprised when Dayton called me. Three months later, I was in North Carolina working with him.

That was a significant turning point in my life, and Dayton was responsible for it. I'd probably be an assistant guano harvester in Stenchcurdle, USA, if not for him. Dayton welcomed me onto a path that I have enjoyed rather than endured.

Publishing Educator

Dayton took an interest in my magazine-publishing education. We cropped physical photos using rulers and Post-It Notes aligned to leave only the exact part of the photo we wanted for reproduction. There was no digital photography; images were input by scanning prints. To layout an article, it was necessary to employ a Pica stick, a ruler for measuring spaces and lengths according to accepted printing specifications. Every cutline, photo box, paragraph, font change, pull quote, header, footer, byline, acknowledgments box, references list, advertisement box — everything was meticulously drawn on large sheets of paper to exact size, and if a line of text didn't fit, we changed the line. If an ad didn't fit, we'd make alterations to the article until the ad was accommodated, adding lines or paragraphs, removing lines or paragraphs, and fixing the problems that accompany each change.

Meanwhile, the editors on our other magazines submitted digital files to the Production Department, (such as they were in those days of green text on black monitor backgrounds) and simple, hand-drawn layouts. Production scanned the photo prints and used software to flow the text into the layout and stretch or compress spacing to make everything fit. Dayton knew that, of course. He wanted me to know the fundamentals.

He was a good boss who let me make mistakes and learn from them, and he eventually trusted me with the magazine, which was unforeseen because P&T was his favorite and it was hard for him to relinquish day-to-day operations. I think he felt that through that publication, he was acknowledging and connecting with his father, who had been an enthusiastic pipe smoker. He took pride in the publication and once told me that he wished his dad could see it.

Many Decades of Experience, Theoretical and Concrete

Dayton worked with tobacco for more than 80 years, from the time he was five years old on his family's Burley tobacco and beef farm. He loved pipes, and he put together an impressive collection, but he was not himself a smoker. The art, engineering, traditions, community, and culture of pipes were his attractions.

That's not to say that Dayton couldn't smoke a pipe. Intellectually, he knew the techniques of pipe smoking very well. Still, he smoked a pipe only once, sitting in my office sometime around 2010. He had meticulously accumulated a large collection of unsmoked artisan pipes, mainly Danish, and they were each spectacular, but for this smoking session, he chose a Dr. Grabow so he could keep his more valuable pieces pristine. I think that was because his primary interest in collecting was the artfulness of pipes.

He wanted me to observe and make sure he was doing everything correctly as he translated his wide theoretical knowledge into the act of smoking. He was perfect. He loaded and lit and tamped that bowl as if he'd been doing it for years and smoked it to the heel with only a rhetorical question or two. He said he enjoyed the experience, but that was his first and last bowl. It neither accelerated nor slowed his own collecting, and although he never became a smoker, he was definitely a pipe man.

Dayton's Start

He earned a Bachelor's degree in Journalism from the University of Kentucky and a Master's in Communications from Michigan State University, and after graduation served two years in the military. Back in civilian life, he continued working for his father, J.O. Matlick, who was part owner of several magazines, including Kentucky Farm and Tennessee Farmer, covering the Burley, Flue-Cured, and Dark-Fired tobacco-farming industries, and the author of the popular Farmer's Handbook. He was also Commissioner of Natural Resources for the State of Kentucky. Though Dayton had worked on the magazines throughout college, he started writing and editing full time for Kentucky Farmer's Home Journal in 1959.

That was obviously before computers, when cut-and-paste meant to literally cut sections from typewritten pages and paste them back together in different order with new transitions and corrections and lots of tape. Dayton often regaled me with stories of driving 150 miles through the night to get to the printer on time, and of hammering out articles on his typewriter while sitting on the trunk of his car outside a tobacco barn where he had just conducted an interview.

Dayton was no office drone. He spent most of his time in the field, usually fields of tobacco. He drove all over three states interviewing and meeting with equipment manufacturers, fertilizer manufacturers, tobacco auctions, and state government agricultural departments. He got to know the farmers and what they wanted covered in the magazines.

He was fit for the job. Friendly and sharp, insightful and proactive, he loved to drive and loved to learn. He'd been a runner all of his life so he had the physical stamina, and he was a black belt in Taekwondo, providing a quiet confidence that made him hard to intimidate in any circumstance.

Early History

When J.O. Matlick suffered four heart attacks in one year, he decided to slow down. He sold his magazines to Harvest Publishing, and Dayton worked for Harvest, moving to Michigan for that post. While working as the editor of Michigan Farmer, he won seven national journalism awards for his writing and editing.

In 1981, Harvest Publishing decided to divest itself of its agricultural publications, and Dayton bought that division with a partner, Jim Swindell, and moved it to North Carolina, naming the new company SpecAg but soon changing it to SpecComm. Among his publications were Tobacco Reporter, a magazine started in 1847 and covering the tobacco industry worldwide — it was and is the top magazine in the field. Several non-tobacco titles were also in the SpecComm stable — Carolina Fairways, a golf magazine, for example, and National Fire and Rescue, for volunteer firefighters, and Emergency Fire/Rescue and Police — but Dayton's first love was always tobacco and he took pride in his tobacco publications, including Flue-Cured Tobacco Farmer, Tobacco Farm Quarterly, Tobacco Science, and Burley Farmer. In 1992 he bought Retail Tobacconist magazine and renamed it Tobacconist, a magazine serving premium tobacco retailers throughout the U.S. In 1996, he founded Pipes and tobaccos magazine to support, entertain, and educate pipe hobbyists worldwide.

Dayton and Pipes

It was a challenge. In terms of revenue, P&T did not perform much better than previous pipe magazines. It reaped only two years of profitability in its 22 years and broke even for about half of its lifetime. Yet Dayton kept publishing it. It had a few advantages over its predecessors. As part of a publishing company, staff and other resources were shared among a dozen magazines, reducing its running costs. Printing costs were reasonable because of the volume of the company's overall printing. And much of the early cost of the magazine was shouldered by its sister publication, Tobacconist, which at the time was a financial bonanza because it was primarily concerned with cigars. A cigar trade magazine during the initial cigar boom, it had plenty of clients, and they could have free or heavily discounted ads in Tobacconist if they also published ads in P&T. The costs to the clients remained the same. If they agreed to the purchase of a page in P&T they would get a free ad in Tobacconist, which was their primary interest because its audience was retail tobacco shops.

Tobacconist wasn't the only thing keeping P&T going. Many of its advertisers didn't see or couldn't track the benefits from the ads, but they kept buying them because they loved the magazine. People in the industry like R.D. Field, Marty Pulvers, Mary and Mike McNiel, Craig Tarler, Sykes Wilford, and Steve Monjure bought ads for years mostly to contribute to the cause. There were many others as well. Probably half of the advertisers in P&T bought ads more to support the magazine than to benefit their own businesses. Though always struggling financially, P&T was good for the hobby, and they felt that what was good for the hobby was good for everyone.

However, Dayton was the magazine's primary benefactor. He used his personal funds for two decades to keep the publication going, all because he loved the hobby, loved P&T, loved the pipe community, and loved pipes.

He also loved the excuse that the magazine provided to travel around the world to see pipe makers. Japan was his favorite destination because he was always attracted to the culture and art of that country, but he visited Denmark frequently, and Germany, England, Italy, Russia — wherever pipes are made. On two occasions, he took part in pipe-making seminars conducted by Lars Ivarsson, and he put together a pipe-making workshop in his basement, though he made very few pipes. He gradually built a pipe collection of the most rare of artisan pipes, displayed in the conference room at SpecComm and open by appointment for public viewing. Many pipe enthusiasts visited to see and handle some of the finest pipes ever made. A local television station did a segment on the collection, interviewing Dayton, and he was often quoted in articles pertaining to the tobacco industry.

His collection was incredible. Some pipes were given to him over the years, and he sometimes traded advertising for pipes, but he purchased most of them. In 2002, he invested $10,000 in a supremely rare Ser Jacopo Gem Series Diamond/Brillante with capello d'angelo (angel-hair grain) that was the best ever made at the time, perhaps ever, and is still featured on the Ser Jacopo website. He acquired the second-best Ser Jacopo the next year.

One of his favorites was the Twin Towers pipe that was made by Castello as a charitable donation after the World Trade Center fell. A gigantic pipe, it features two bowls configured like the towers. It was to be auctioned at the CORPS pipe show, and Dayton sent me to purchase it, saying, "Since it's for charity, let's go $6,000." I told him it probably wouldn't get that high. He nodded. "$6,000," he said. During the auction, bids fell off after about $4,000 and I asked for a brief pause. The only bidder besides myself at that point was Matt Hayes of John B. Hayes Tobacconist in Virginia. I huddled quietly with Matt for a moment. "Dayton wants to contribute $6k. Can you bid me up to that price?" He was amused and agreed, we laughingly and dramatically continued bidding against each other, and the pipe was added to the P&T collection at Dayton's preferred contribution.

Another Castello in the collection was a large Saxophone shape, made after Hurricane Katrina damaged New Orleans. It too was oversized, and was probably acquired similarly, though I don't remember the details. Perhaps the most interesting pipe was one made by 30 different Danish carvers, each completing an individual procedure to manifest a pipe of astonishing workmanship, accompanied by a briar wand about a foot long with all of the makers' stamps. Dayton preferred bent, smooth pipes and only one or two straight pipes made it into the collection. Among the few sandblasts was a J.T. Cooke Poker whose ring grain and deep, craggy blast were enough to make any pipe smoker envious. In fact, you could pluck any random pipe from the display cases and find in your hand an advanced work of artistic mastery.

There were many astonishing pipes: one of the best that Jess Chonowitsch ever made; several amazing S. Bangs; two or three large Lars Ivarssons and a couple of Sixtens; Kurt Balleby; Jody Davis; Poul Ilsted; Michael Lindner; Tom Eltang ... truly an astonishing conglomeration of craftsmanship. It came to more than 300 pipes, and Dayton was not the only one to appreciate them. We often hosted pipe makers who examined the collection. Where else, aside, perhaps, from the Chicago pipe show, could a pipe maker or enthusiast inspect so many of the finest pipes ever made by the most respected pipe makers in the world? Dayton's taste for smooth, complex shapes rather than traditional became a collecting strategy, and he loved each one.

Wide Industry Influence

Pipes may have been Dayton's passion, but he was involved in every aspect of tobacco from a publishing standpoint. He owned TabExpo, which started in 1994 and continues to be a global exposition for all aspects of tobacco manufacturing, meeting at various locations around the world every four years. Gigantic manufacturing companies transport hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment to display while countless seminars and meetings occur. That was his largest and most profitable property, but he published magazines covering every aspect of tobacco, from preparing farmland, to planting and caring for tobacco crops, to harvesting and curing, to auctions and manufacturing facilities, to retail sales, consumer interests, and even vapor with his magazine, Vapor Voice. He was a tobacco Renaissance Man, friends with important tobacco people around the world, and interested in every detail about the leaf that captivates all of us.

As founder and owner of Pipes and tobaccos, Dayton supported the pipe industry and hobby by providing educational and entertaining material for readers, promoting pipe making, pipe smoking, tobacco manufacture, and pipe clubs, and advancing pipe smoking in every way possible. P&T dedicated considerable real estate in its pages to promoting new businesses. Dozens of successful pipe makers and small companies received continuous promotion to help them get started, and many have said they would have had no chance except for the coverage provided in P&T. It was an influential magazine, and Dayton was generous with it, sharing its promotional strength to help others advance the hobby.

He helped hundreds of people find their way in the world of tobacco, myself included. Nothing I have written about pipes would exist if not for Dayton, and dozens of accessory and pipe makers would be equally absent from our world. His butterfly effect was impressive. He helped a little here, nudged a little there, and used his position to provide support wherever he could, making the scope of pipe smoking larger, friendlier, and easier for thousands. Few people in our hobby know about him, but those who do know him as an unsurpassed supporter of all things tobacco. Though not a smoker, he was a pipe and tobacco man down to his DNA, and while relatively unknown, preferring to quietly remain in the background, the echoes of his influence will be enjoyed by all of us for generations.