As cold weather creeps closer, veteran questions smoking ban / LJWorld.com

Speedy takes one more sip of his whiskey and Coke and decides it's time to light one up. It's 2:45 p.m. on a Friday.

"See what I've got to go through?" Speedy asks, being tilted back in his wheelchair as his friend Rowdy Brouhard pulls him out the front door of the Cross Town Tavern, 1910 Haskell Ave.

Raymond "Speedy" Perdue hates the new smoking ban. Perdue served in two wars and is upset that he doesn't have the right to smoke with his friends inside the Cross Town Tavern, 1910 Haskell Ave. Perdue is wheelchair bound from a stroke and knows it will be a hassle to smoke outside when winter arrives.

The city's 4-month-old smoking ban poses an unusual challenge for 72-year-old Raymond "Speedy" Perdue. Not only does he depend on friends to give him a ride to his neighborhood bar, he now depends on them to wheel him outside between drinks.

The weather's getting colder, a fact Perdue notices more than most because of poor blood circulation. And U.S. troops are fighting in Iraq, a fact Perdue mentions often.

Cigarette by cigarette, Speedy -- himself a veteran of wars in Korea and Vietnam -- is getting more ticked off at the City Commission, which passed the ban.

'I'll die where I want'

"What the hell did I fight for?" he'd asked earlier that day, sitting with a pink electric blanket on his lap at his home on Haskell Avenue a few blocks from the bar. "If they want to dictate, go over to Iraq. I ain't kidding you ... I'm 72 years old, by God, and I'll die where I want to. And it ain't going to be out smoking in a (expletive deleted) snowdrift."

Perdue makes the half-mile trip to the tavern whenever he can get someone to give him a ride. He grew up in Lawrence and, long before he suffered the stroke that disabled all his limbs except his right arm, he earned the nickname "Speedy."

The name stuck. For his birthday this year -- July 4 -- friends from the tavern got him a sign for the back of his wheelchair that reads "Speedy #1" with a silhouette of an extended middle finger.

To Perdue, it's no stretch to equate patriotism with the freedom to smoke. In a 2000 Journal-World article about a newly formed Vietnam veterans' group, Perdue was photographed with a veterans' hat on his head and a cigarette in his hand.

Driving people away

Raymond "Speedy" Perdue is wheelchair bound from a stroke and knows it will be a hassle to smoke outside when winter arrives.

He said he started smoking at age 5, when he asked for a drag from an older friend's Lucky Strike. The first puff made him so sick, he remembers, that he fell in a creek.

He dropped out of high school, went to work digging ditches and, when he tired of that, enlisted in the Air Force. He later worked as a painter at Kansas University.

After his stroke 16 years ago this month, a nurse told him he'd be dead in four months if he didn't stop smoking. Today his brand of choice is Gunsmokes, which he buys in bulk on an Indian reservation.

He smokes up to two packs a day, depending on whether it's a day he goes to the bar.

"I ain't dead yet," he said.

Though Perdue is concerned about the cold weather setting in, he said his anger about the smoking ban wasn't just about his own circumstances.

For one, he and Brouhard both say many people they know are driving to neighboring cities such as Linwood or Eudora to go to bars and smoke, which they say is leading to more drunken driving. Perdue also said he worried whether bar owners and employees could feed their families, as their incomes drop with less business.

Why no vote?

But Perdue's main problem with the smoking ban is that he thinks it was introduced in the wrong way. He knows supporters of the ban say it's a matter of public health, but at least, he said, it should be put to a public vote.

"I didn't fight in two wars, by God, for what they've got going on around here," he said. "I grew up in this town, and it wasn't like this a long time ago."

Asked to respond to Perdue's concerns, City Commissioner David Schauner repeated an explanation he's given before: The commission was told that because of a technicality in state law, it simply didn't have the authority to put the smoking question on the ballot. Instead, it must be put there by a petition with at least 3,764 signatures.

As of September, bar and restaurant owners said they'd collected roughly 4,000 signatures of registered voters and were planning to keep gathering the signatures through late November.

"Ultimately, Speedy will get what he wants," Schauner said. "He will get a vote of the people, and if the people say it stinks, they can vote it out."