Beautiful People

He was against it. He was against tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, corsets, cocoa, ginger ale, sirloin steak, vaccination, capital punishment, Tammany Hall and artificially flavored lollipops. He could spot a cocoa drinker at 20 paces by the "yellow eyes and degenerate skin." Once he weaned a Sing Sing death-house prisoner from tobacco, several days before execution. During World War I he wired President Wilson that coffee would prevent U.S. soldiers from shooting straight, and ought to be forbidden them.

In this relentless crusade, pink-faced, bright-eyed, dapper Dr. Charles Giffin Pease, dentist, teacher, founder and president of the Non-Smokers Protective League of America, was pursuing his idea of beauty. Said he: "Oh, if the human race would but live right, what a beautiful people the human race would be!"

Dr. Pease's birthday parties, at his home in Manhattan, were arranged by his adopted daughter (whom he adopted when she was 46), were famed for their harp music, original poetry, fruit juices, ice cream and the number of reporters present. At one party Dr. Pease told the press about a horse of his acquaintance who had jumped off a cliff after some tea leaves had accidentally been mixed with his feed.

Dr. Pease's was a losing fight, and he knew it, but he never gave up. He had his consolations, and one triumph: the enforcement of the ban on smoking in New York's subways, which he took to court and won.

Last week, as it must to all reformers, death came, at 86, to Charles Giffin Pease. The human race, not living right, and not very beautiful, went right on.

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