People Ban: Louisville Private Clubs

From Moose to vets, private clubs must ban smoking too

November 20, 2006
Joseph Gerth

Mike Deeley served his country and figures he earned his right to have a drink and a smoke at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Robert E. Newman Post.

As he talks with fellow veterans, Deeley puffs away on his Marlboro and sips his domestic beer.

The Navy veteran who served in Vietnam, dreads the day when he’ll have to take his cigarette outside.

But that day is coming.

On July 1, the post and other private Louisville clubs will join the hundreds of public buildings that are already smoke-free.

“It’s not right,” Deeley said. “If they can sell them, I ought to be able to smoke them.”

While much of the attention has focused on bars, which have sued to block enforcement of Louisville’s stricter ban, little has been said about private clubs that also must go smoke free.

They run the gamut from exclusive social settings such as the Pendennis Club to such local Democratic groups as the All Wool and a Yard Wide Democratic Club in Schnitzelburg.

And most of them aren’t happy about giving up their smokes.

“These are combat veterans,” said John Mitchell, post commander at the Robert E. Newman VFW in Southern Louisville, who was a five-pack-a-day smoker before he gave it up a year ago. “Some of them are hardened. Some of them have post-traumatic stress disorder, and they want to tell them they can’t smoke.”

While nearly a dozen cities and counties in Kentucky have adopted smoking bans, Louisville is the first to outlaw smoking in private clubs and organizations, said Ellen Hahn, a nursing professor at the University of Kentucky who has been involved in the smoke-free movement.

“From our standpoint, the fewer exemptions the better,” she said.

Even the national group Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights includes an exemption for private clubs in the model ordinance it suggests cities enact — as long as the clubs have no employees.

At least initially, Louisville also planned to exempt private clubs.

When Metro Council member Ken Fleming, R-7th, filed an ordinance last summer to strengthen Louisville’s current smoking ban, he left out private groups. But his proposal was amended to make those organizations smoke free.

Fleming said he favored the change, which he said made the ordinance more comprehensive.

It means the tougher smoking ban will include the American Legion, Amvets and VFW, as well as service organizations such as the Moose, Elks and Eagles. Mason’s and religious organizations such as the Knights of Columbus also will have to go smoke free.

For the VFW, it’s an issue being played out nationally, as the group’s national commander has urged posts to go smoke free and even open cyber cafes and day cares — all in an effort to recruit younger and women veterans as they come back from Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the Highland’s American Legion Post on Bardstown Road, officers there are trying to figure out how to deal with what they believe will be harmful effects of the ban.

An aging group with half its 1,100 members from World War II, and fewer people attending bingo sessions because of changes in the charitable gaming laws, Commander Mike Phelps said he’s concerned how the group will continue its philanthropic efforts after the ban.

“The membership is dying off, the Department of Charitable Gaming has done us in and the smoking ban is the nail in the coffin,” said Phelps, a nonsmoker who has a “no smoking” sign in his office.

Bob Unger, the post’s finance officer, said there has even been some informal, preliminary talk about selling the post — an old log cabin and a large hall behind it — and buying a smaller building, if membership and income continue to fall.

Metro Council member Tom Owen said he was surprised to hear that private groups are opposed to the ban because, in more than three years of discussing it, he never received even a call from one of them.

Though he said, “I personally wouldn’t have been interested in providing an exemption” for them.

At the Kosair Shrine Temple, the reaction has been muted.

Randy Coe, a spokesman for the Shriners, said his group and its 3,000 members will abide by the new law, and Coe sees it as an opportunity.

“It may have an overall benefit,” said Coe, who gave up smoking more than 25 years ago. “Some of our members will be inconvenienced if they have to go outside to smoke, but my personal preference is that we help them with kicking habit.”

But Judy Hinton, who manages the bar at the Moose Lodge in Jeffersontown, worries that the smoking ban could cause membership to drop, harming the club and the group’s charitable giving.

Moose International Inc. operates a facility in Chicago for orphans and children whose parents can’t take care of them. Local Moose lodges help pay for the facility as well as provide services for children locally.

Hinton said she worries that because many of the Jeffersontown lodge’s 137 members smoke, they’ll stay at home, where no one will hassle them about lighting up.

“I think it sucks,” she said of the new law.