Yes, all of those things. Today we seek things. Then, they sought comfort.There was Kool, and there was True (with the funky filter vanes). And a bunch of others I no longer remember. And the big standards, Lucky Strike, Chesterfield, Winston, Camel, PM, and a few others I forget. Some may have had different export names. Some brands included trading coupons in every pack (Raleigh). If you smoked enough, you could eventually cash them in for stuff out of the catalog. I was never a cigarette smoker, but you couldn't miss them under the fluorescent lights in the vending machines. Or their jingle songs on TV and radio.
Insert your coins, pull the knob, and if all went well, the pack dropped. If not, the nearby cashier would refund you on the honor system. Need matches? A mountain of packs at the register or at the bar. All for free. They would advertise the place on them.
There were indoor ashtrays, and outdoor ones, too. In an office building, they'd be freestanding or bolted to the walls. Custodians used to go around at the end of the day and empty the ashtrays in many buildings along with the trash cans.
And, of course, there were the table lighters. Thousands and thousands of them. Almost every house had at least one. Once the perfect housewarming gift. The fodder for a thousand TV and movie gags during that era when they didn't work. The only gift cooler was a table-top cigarette case. How they filled them from the boxes and cartons of cigarettes sold then, I'll never know.
And the common stand ashtray at every relative's house ... the ones with the glass insert, and animal handles of one species or another on top. Or ... a pipe station on a table somewhere.
Not to mention all the cigars and pipes, everywhere. It wasn't all White Owl and Dutch Masters at the drug store, either. You could often walk out out of a news store with a decent hand-made (... sometimes locally made!). As some know, my first and dearest pipe came from a news store case. And it's a great smoker.
So that was the playing field on which these OTCs pipe blends ruled the roost. There were plenty of other brands, too (don't misunderstand). But these standards were preferred by most smoking men. Tobacco was a major league industry then. If they are as bad as some now claim, they just never would have made it.
My father’s cigarette box he brought back from the Philippines after the war: