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• WOESTENDIEK: Up in smoke 

Tomorrow at midnight the last smoldering cigarettes will be snuffed out in barroom ashtrays across Maryland. . . .

Nevertheless, you must remember this: For hundreds of years, the smoky tavern/pub/cocktail lounge/jazz club/blues bar have been part of our culture, and to erase the memory of it would be wrong, on numerous levels. So, too, would be failing to acknowledge its demise.

Hence, this homage to the smoke-filled bar - an ode to an odor most foul, a paean to a pain in the neck. For in losing the smoke-filled bar, we are losing a layer of society's texture - granted, an unhealthy, lung-irritating, certifiably toxic texture - but texture all the same. It's another vanishing icon, like the milkman, the typewriter, 8-track tapes and the rotary phone.

It's another tool lost for writers and movie directors . . .

When a piece of popular culture bites the dust - even as unpopular a piece as the smoky bar - it rates an obit ...

Smoky Bar, the illegitimate son of Sir Walter Raleigh whose roots stretch back to Colonial times, died today after a long illness.

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