Jerry Elsner begins every morning the same way: He gets up, has a cup of coffee and smokes a cigarette. Outside.
Banished to the patio by his non-smoking wife, four daughters and a son, Elsner puffs away while contemplating a ”smoking stinks” sign strategically tacked to the deck by his children.
”I was nagged into doing it,” Elsner said of his puffing sessions outside his Willowbrook home.
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A smoker for 30 years, Elsner`s forays began about six months ago when he became convinced that the smoke from his cigarettes posed a danger to his family.
”I was not aware that passive smoke was dangerous. Now I`m aware of it,” Elsner said. ”If you smoke at home-in your home-with your family, it`s a terrible injustice to your family. I really feel that way.”
Smokers already have been evicted from many workplaces and public buildings and conveyances, leaving the home as a last refuge for some, whatever the gripes by non-smoking kin about about lingering smells, messy ashtrays and burned upholstery.
But a recent barrage of studies on the effects of second-hand smoke on spouses and children-ranging from cancer and heart disease to behavioral problems in children-has raised the stakes immeasurably.
True, the dire warnings from the medical establishment haven`t persuaded all smokers to quit, but they have jolted many into changing their habits at home-or their families into enforcing domestic no-smoking laws.
The result has been everything from undeclared war on the homefront to complicated accommodations involving territories and circumstances under which the smoker may smoke.
”It`s becoming more and more of a proven fact that I`m putting them at risk and not just myself,” Gus Marchetti says. A Lindenhurst resident, Marchetti finally listened to the pleas of his non-smoking family and quit his 35-year habit on Aug. 31. He`s now using a nicotine patch.
”I don`t want them to have the problems I have,” said Marchetti, who has been hospitalized twice in the last five years for smoking-related health problems.
Meanwhile, the medical arsenal on second-hand smoke continues to grow. A study due out in November at the American Heart Association meeting links passive smoking to hardening of the arteries in laboratory rabbits; and a draft of a long-awaited EPA project calls secondhand cigarette smoke a known carcinogen that causes death from lung cancer in non-smokers, and respiratory and ear problems in children.
A tobacco industry spokesman criticized both pending reports as statistically unsound.
”We are uncomfortable with the level to which science has been manipulated to an anti-smoking agenda,” said Thomas Lauria, spokesman for the Tobacco Institute in Washington. The group is a trade association for tobacco products manufacturers. ”The weight of evidence shows it`s not a problem.”
But many non-smokers, and even the smokers they live with, are starting to heed the message of the studies.
About four years ago, doctors treating Carlos Garcia for asthma told his parents that they triggered their son`s asthmatic attacks with their cigarette smoking.
”It blew me away,” said Carlos` mother, Patty Conforti, of Chicago.
”That was when there was no more smoking in the house, period. Not if his life was in danger.”
Conforti and her former husband, also named Carlos Garcia, tried but failed to quit smoking. Each continues to smoke, but only outdoors, and never around their son, who spends time at both their houses.
”It`s funny in the winter to see them out there smoking, with a cup of coffee and their mittens on, trying to hold a cigarette,” said son Carlos, 16. ”They feel for me, and I feel for them.”
In other families, smoking is a more divisive issue.
Lauren Kwasniewski, 26, is getting married Oct. 9. An ardent non-smoker, she does not want her white-beaded wedding gown and headpiece to smell like cigarettes. She refused to store her bridal outfit at her mother`s home in Rolling Meadows.
Her mother, Kathy Flemming, does not smoke. But Kwasniewski`s 24-year-old sister, Elyse, who lives with their mother, does. Elyse will be the maid of honor.
”That`s the last thing I want to do, spend my wedding day in a dress that smells like cigarette smoke,” Lauren Kwasniewski said. ”If the dress were hanging there a week or two, it`s something you would smell.”
When Kwasniewski told her mother that she couldn`t store the dress with her, Flemming was crushed.
”I was taken aback by it and thought that was terrible,” Flemming said. ”That was all part of the plan-her dress would be there and she`d come to my house to get dressed. I was very hurt by it.”
But then, Flemming said, she began to think her daughter had a good idea. ”I totally understand it,” Flemming said. ”Now that she`s saying it, I`m thinking maybe I don`t want to bring my dress home.”
One woman with a new baby and a grade-school child has reached an unofficial agreement with her husband that he can smoke only in his basement office in their Chicago home. But they have yet to settle the issue of smoking by friends and relatives at dinner parties. So far, smoking continues in those circumstances.
Roughly one-quarter of American adults smoke, federal statistics show, down from about 42 percent in 1965. Because of population growth, however, the actual number of smokers in the United States has declined only slightly, from 50 million in 1965 to 46 million in 1990.
Some smokers tire of fighting with non-smoking spouses, siblings and friends and quit cold turkey. Others struggle for years, enduring arguments with loved ones instead of life without cigarettes. The addiction is too strong.
Michael Pakis, an addictions counselor in Park Ridge, smoked two packs of cigarettes daily for 14 years before quitting in 1989. After he stopped, his roommate continued to smoke.
”That was hard in the beginning because I was getting triggered, smelling the smoke in the morning,” Pakis said. ”Later on, it became a nuisance. I seriously disliked smelling smoke in the apartment and had an aversion to dirty ashtrays.”
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Partly to avoid the smoke, Pakis now lives alone.
”People don`t smoke in my house. I don`t even let my mom smoke in my house,” he said. ”I bought a brand-new car and no one`s ever smoked in it.” Still, he said, he sometimes misses his cigarettes.
”Smoking for me was like putting life on pause,” Pakis said. ”I could sit back and smoke a cigarette and think about what I was going to do, what my plans for the day were, and what I needed to follow up with. It was a way to relax and think and a real ritual that was very soothing.”
Marchetti, the Lindenhurst man who quit smoking Aug. 31, knows that ritual, too. He had smoked since he was 12. But the effects of a comment by a family member apparently were more powerful.
”I did have one of my grandsons tell me I smelled,” Marchetti said. ”I felt very small and it kind of concerned me that maybe he wouldn`t come up and get in my lap anymore. That would very much bother me.”
His wife, Mary, hopes he`s serious this time.
”I`ve laid down the law, let`s put it that way,” she said. ”I`ve said, `You have to quit. I`m not going to put up with it anymore.` ”
Fifteen years ago, at 29, she lost her first husband to cancer, though it was unrelated to smoking. She cannot bear the notion that another spouse could suffer a similarly agonizing death.
”I`ve been through the experience of losing a spouse, and with my husband smoking and having problems and going into the hospital, it stresses me out,” she said.
In the current climate, even former smokers say they have a difficult time understanding-let alone empathizing with-smokers, though yet another medical study released last week may have put that issue in a new light. The study suggests that genes may influence whether people feel the urge to smoke and may make quitting difficult for heavy smokers.
In the meantime, the secondary smoke wars go on.
After eight years as a smoker, Carol Snyder quit on March 24, 1991. Her husband, Larry, continues to smoke, as he has for 25 years.
Carol admits that she pesters her husband to stop, and makes him go outside or into the garage instead of puffing away inside of the couple`s new home.
”I do get on his case now that I`ve quit,” she conceded.
But her husband ignores her requests.
”I don`t want to quit. I guess I`m not ready,” said Snyder, a Highland Park police officer. ”I take her seriously, but guess what-I`m not going to do it.”