Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, November 5, 1993                   TAG: 9311050126
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ALLEN THE SPITTING IMAGE OF A GOOD OLE BOY

In electing George Allen governor, it has returned snuff dipping to the highest reaches of the Old Dominion. It has chosen a chief executive perpetually buzzed on nicotine and prone to randomly ooze brown juice.

Allen routinely reaches into his hip pocket for that little can of Copenhagen tobacco. ("Plain," he told a Richmond newspaper. "The sweet stuff gives you pimples.") He takes a pinch, plants it between the lower lip and the gum and awaits the quick buzz when the nicotine hits all those little blood vessels. Then he spits into a 7-Eleven cup.

Talk about genteel.

"Spittoons? Oh absolutely, I'm sure we've got them over here in storage somewhere," J.T. Shropshire said this week. Shropshire, until recently chief of staff to Gov. Doug Wilder, has been a fixture at the Richmond capitol building since the '60s. The spittoons came out of the capitol in the '70s as the old-line Byrd machine receded, he recalled, but William Faulkner must have been thinking about Virginia when he wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

"They were brass - real golden," Shropshire recalled about the cuspidors. He also remembered that state prison inmates used to clean them. "Polished? Oh, always polished," he declared. "This is Virginia!"

Even though tobacco assured the success of the Virginia colony, snuff has not been a big item in the Old Dominion since the 18th century, said Greg Kimball, a curator for the Valentine Museum in Richmond. Thomas Jefferson hated tobacco, archivists at Monticello said.

But then again, Allen first got into snuff not in Virginia but in high school in Los Angeles, said his mother, Etty. He learned it from the Rams football players his father coached. They also taught him to wear his signature cowboy boots.

George and his younger brother Bruce have a wordless ritual when they meet. They hold out their cans of snuff, stiff-armed, so the freshness date on the bottom can be read. This shows which has been consumed faster.

Because of George's snuff dipping, tobacco spitting, cowboy-boot wearing, pickup-truck driving and living in an upper-middle-class five-bedroom log home, Bruce calls his brother "Jethro."

Figures, said Edward Ayers, a University of Virginia historian. "The dominant image of the South after the Civil War was people spitting. Visitors were always struck by the amount of saliva and tobacco all over the floor."

"Dipping says a lot," said Ayers. "It's a way of declaring independence from blue-suited Republicans. Southerners are constantly trying to have their roots and the modern world too. How much Allen is a Southern man is not clear at all, but [his snuff habit] is a reassurance of manliness and of unwillingness to be completely homogenized by the national culture."

So forget those jokes about Mary Sue Terry not coming within spitting distance of Allen in the election, and not being up to snuff.

Instead, listen to Robert Cantrell, chair of the otolaryngology department of the University of Virginia. Snuff dipping causes "very nasty cancers" of the gums, cheek and tongue - "very malignant," he said.