Rube Goldberg's Pipe

If you hang around New York enough, you'll find traces of the great cartoonists of yesteryear all over. Last night, after dinner on West 36th Street at Keens Steakhouse—the apostrophe has been abandoned to history—we admired a display that was a small part of the world's largest collection of churchwarden pipes. The chop house's past patrons included more than 90,000 members of the Pipe Club, whose pipes were registered and stored on the premises by a pipe warden, and dutifully retrieved when the customer returned by pipe boys. Many twentieth century luminaries were members of this club: Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Albert Einstein, Enrico Caruso, Will Rogers, Babe Ruth, Robert Benchley—and cartoonist Rube Goldberg. I've given his pipe it's own photograph:

Which is not to say that Goldberg's pipe doesn't share the display case with the pipes of some mighty fine people.

There are some more recent members of the Pipe Club as well. Some of the names may be familiar.

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