Keens English Chophouse, as it used to be called, was where my great-grandfather worked as the Pipe Warden in the late 1930s to about 1962. They used clay churchwarded pipes and I remember playing with the miniature souvenir pipes they sold. Last month, my mom moved out of her house of 42 years, the one I grew up in, and we spent the packing time going through the stuff of a few lifetimes. We rediscovered (and discovered) a few interesting artifacts. Keens-wise: a couple old pipes (number 117 belonging to a Mr. Morley!), a silver Pipe Club glass bottomed stein (glass bottomed so the drinker could keep his eye on people while the cup was raised to drink), a Pipe Club membership card, #26856 (my grandfather's, signed by his father-in-law, the Pipe Warden), and an excerpt of "the virtues of whiskey" reprinted from Hollingshed's Chronicles of 1577.
My great-grandfather's name was Peter Reimer, but at Keen's he went by Peter Woods becuase of the world's relations with Germany during those years... He wore a tux to work every single day, but I remember him from a photo on a wall-full of family photos: He wore a boat hat and a striped tee-shirt and pants and had his grand-daughter on his knee (my mom). They sat by the hand-pump well outside the Dutch kitchen doors of the "country house" he build at Lake Carmel north of NYC.
This is what Keens says about its pipes:
Keens Steakhouse owns the largest collection of churchwarden pipes in the world. The tradition of checking one’s pipe at the inn had its origins in 17th century Merrie Old England where travelers kept their clay at their favorite inn – the thin stemmed pipe being too fragile to be carried in purse or saddlebag. Pipe smoking was known since Elizabethan times to be beneficial for dissipating “evil homourse of the brain.” Keens's pipe tradition began in the early 20th century.
The hard clay churchwarden pipes were brought from the Netherlands and as many as 50,000 were ordered every three years. A pipe warden registered and stored the pipes, while pipe boys returned the pipes from storage to the patrons.
The membership roster of the Pipe Club contained over ninety thousand names, including those of Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, Billy Rose, Grace Moore, Albert Einstein, George M. Cohan, J.P. Morgan, Stanford White, John Barrymore, David Belasco, Adlai Stevenson, General Douglas MacArthur and “Buffalo Bill” Cody.
