A Closer Look: Mary Van Maren-Foley, MBA 1984

IN 1996, 284,000 premium cigars were sold in the United States to customers who forked over $800 million for the pleasure of smoking them. The entire cigar sales total that year, down to the stinkiest stogie, came to 4.6 billion units and cost consumers $1.6 billion. And that's not just blowing smoke. Not since 1962--the year that astronaut John Glenn won his weight in Cuban cigars for his historic triple orbit of the earth and, incidentally, Cuban cigars were banned from the United States--have American cigar sales soared so high.
      1996 was also the year that Mary Van Maren-Foley and her husband, Kevin Foley, opened the Cigar Locker of Granite Bay, a cigar store and wine bar in a 100-year-old farmhouse near Rocklin, Calif., halfway between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe, not far from the ranch where Mary grew up. "Just ask the locals," says Van Maren-Foley. "They'll point you in the right direction!" (Non-Californians can visit at www.cigarlocker.com.)
      Van Maren-Foley came to the cigar business by a circuitous route--six years in sales promotion for Apple Computer, followed by three years as a project manager for Walt Disney's planned city Celebration and a brief stint at Tupperware World Headquarters. Kevin, the cigar aficionado in the family, had started selling handcrafted humidors in 1995; the store, wine bar, private label microbrew Locker Bocker, and Mary followed. Mary, who is now developing wine and gourmet gift crates for the corporate market and running a business research firm, collaborated with Kevin on a book, Blowing Smoke: Being a Compendium of Amusing Anecdotes, Witty Ripostes, and Lengthy Literary Passages on the Glories of the Cigar, that was published in mid-October and had sold about 200,000 copies by Christmas.
      Blowing Smoke is filled with the kind of information you never knew you wanted to know until you read it. For instance, did you know that Urban VIII issued a papal bull forbidding Spanish priests to smoke cigars? That in 1849, New Yorkers spent more money on cigars than on bread? That stogies were named for the cigars smoked by the drivers of Conestoga wagons? That George Burns's cigar is imprinted on Hollywood Boulevard? Oh, and that bit about John Glenn? Blowing Smoke, page 17.

--BY JANET ZICH

Mary Van Maren-Foley has made it her business to learn more than anyone needs to know about cigars.