Sometime this month, an Army captain in Iraq named Ryan Main will receive a small white box mailed from a shop just a few home runs from Coors Field.
When Main opens it, he’ll find 25 premium cigars, fragrant with Dominican tobacco, hand-rolled and shipped by a total stranger.
The stranger’s name is Clay Carl ton. Whatever his other claims to fame, one stands out: He’s the only Coloradan holding both a barber’s license and a federal cigar manufacturing license.
“We really don’t know who we’re sending these cigars to,” Carlton said. “They generally just go to an Army Post Office address. But that’s fine. We know the troops enjoy them. They’ve sent us letters from the field.”
Carlton owns Palma Cigar Co., housed in a brick building at 2207 Larimer St. The one-man tobacco operation is in the front, his two-chair barber shop in back.
“I’ve been barbering for 30 years, and I always had cigars for sale to customers,” Carlton said. “Ten years ago I decided to give them something different. I took a sabbatical, went to Florida and apprenticed for two months with a master cigar roller.”
He came home and practiced another six months — “until I felt I was making cigars worth selling” — and went into business. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms told him it was the first manufacturing license they had issued in the state since Groucho Marx and Milton Berle were brandishing stogies on their TV shows.
Carlton’s Cigars to the Troops campaign started three years ago. He read a magazine article about an Army major who had designated a smoking bunker for his troops. Carlton mailed him a batch. They were a hit.
With private donations, including a $5,000 gift that let him create a nonprofit agency, he’s sending more than 1,000 cigars a month to Iraq. Carlton rolls some; the bulk are made at a factory in the Dominican Republic that creates them to his specifications.
“One of my customers is in the Reserves in Iraq,” Carlton said. “His wife came in and told me he’d gotten one of my cigars just last week. He was thrilled.”
So was Carlton.
On Friday, as the sidewalks teemed with Rockies fans heading to the home opener, Carlton put the finishing touches on a smoke — one of 10,000 he rolls a year.
It was a robusto, made with a blend of Dominican tobaccos that were rolled two weeks earlier and placed in the shop’s humidor “in repose” to blend the flavors.
Carlton retrieved a heavy mahogany cutting block about the size of a laptop computer. Pulling a leaf of top-grade Connecticut tobacco from a bag, he smoothed it out like a slip of crumpled paper.
He took a half-moon blade called a cheveta and sliced out a strip a foot long and 2 inches wide. The cigar was placed atop the wrapper at an angle. Then he rolled it up, stopping a few times to apply a thread of water-based vegetable glue to the seams.
Carlton took a cutting disc and hewed a nickel-sized circle from another scrap of leaf. This was the cap, the mouth end of the cigar.
Behold, a cigar. Carlton smiled.
“I just like the craft of doing this,” he said. “It’s my passion. It’s not even a job.”
There are few if any pleasures soldiering in Iraq, but Carlton is bringing a bit of comfort to the troops, one cigar at a time.
William Porter’s column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1977 or wporter@denverpost.com.
