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This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell all kinds of stories here on this show. And one of our favorites is what we like to call our American Dreamer series. And always, that series is brought to us by the great folks at Job Creators Network, advocating for small businesses. And working hard to help them turn their small businesses into bigger ones.
Today's story is about the oldest family-owned premium cigar company in the United States. Here's Drew Newman with the story. One of the things I really love about premium cigars is that they tend to bring people together. Today we live in such a divisive world. with people having very strong feelings about lots of issues.
And our country is pretty divided. But cigars, it seems, are one of the few things that bring people together. It doesn't matter your age, your race, your gender, the language you're speaking, your income, your job, or anything. If you enjoy a cigar, We can sit down together. and were friends.
And I've seen this play out time and time again: that cigars bring people together across different divides. It's like a modern-day. Peace pipe. You strike a match or light a lighter and you light the cigar. And it's lit.
You can't speed up the process and in fact a cigar slows you down. It forces you to take a break. to sit down, to think about life or whatever's on your mind. to sit down and ask your neighbor what's going on in his or her life. And it allows you to form a connection with other people, and it's a shared bonding experience that builds trust.
Over generations, cigars have been used as gifts, part of diplomatic negotiations, to end wars, to bring peace together. And it's a real privilege to be in this industry to continue this. Heritage. My name is Drew Newman, and I am the great-grandson of Julius Caesar Newman, who founded the J.C. Newman Cigar Company.
I think what makes us and our family and our company different is that we are a four-generation. 125-year-old family business. When my great-grandfather started our company in 1895, there were 42,000 licensed cigar manufacturers in the United States. And of those 42,000, we're still the only one owned and operated by the founding family that's still in business. My great-grandfather Julius Caesar Newman.
was born in a tiny village in 1875 in rural Austria-Hungary. And he wrote that he was born Uh in a house That was made out of brick. and it was the only house made out of brick in their tiny village. And on the first floor of that house was the local general store and tavern. And on the second floor is where my family lived, where he was born, and where he grew up.
And everyone called it the brick house. And apparently, it was this beautiful rural setting, and they had cows and goats and chickens, and my great-grandfather grew up surrounded by nature. And when he came to America as an immigrant in 1888 and landed in Cleveland, Ohio, in the middle of the industrial age, it was noisy and dirty and crowded, he really missed the pastoral setting of his childhood.
So, one of the earliest brands of cigars that he created was called. Brick house. And he created it to reminisce and honor and remember the house that he grew up in in Austria, Hungary. And so, if you open a box of brick house cigars that we still sell today and take a look at the inside label, you'll see a house made out of brick. That was what my great-grandfather remembered about the house that he grew up in, which was the only brick house, and it's surrounded by farm animals and this beautiful, lush countryside because my great-grandfather was homesick for the old world, for the country he was born into.
When my great-grandfather, Julius Newman, came to America in 1888. He was 13 years old. And he didn't speak. English. He immigrated through the port of Baltimore.
And he had to go through the immigration process, which included being interviewed by an immigrations officer. And he had his papers in his hand. And when he went up for the interview, the officer asked him. What's your middle name? You wrote here on your form, your name is Julius Newman, but there's a a field for middle name and it's blank.
My great-grandfather couldn't respond because he couldn't speak English.
So the immigration officer, perhaps out of amusement, decided: well, if your first name is Julius. I'm going to give you the middle name Caesar.
So he wrote Caesar on the form, and from that day on, my great-grandfather was known as Julius. Caesar Newman, which is why our company is called the J. C. Newman Cigar Company. But what makes that story even more interesting is that the immigration officer must not have been very well educated because he misspelled Caesar.
Julius Caesar, the Roman Emperors C A E S A R But my great-grandfather's middle name was C A E S E R.
So we have this cigar that I created a few years ago called Diamond Crown Julius Caesar that has my great-grandfather dressed up as a Roman on the cigar band. But if you look on the band, The Caesar spelled C A E S E R And hardly a week goes by that someone doesn't call or email and says, hey, you misspelled Caesar. But the reality is, Caesar spelled correctly because that's how my great-grandfather's middle name was spelled on his immigration form when he came to America in 1888. My great grandfather lived the American dream. He came to the United States with his family in 1888.
Not speaking English. Not having any money. not really knowing how he wanted to spend his life. But he knew that coming to the United States, he would have the opportunity to build a life for himself and his family.
So, with his mother and his father and his brothers and sisters, they happened to settle in Cleveland, Ohio. Where others from their part of Austria-Hungary happened to be. And my great-grandfather learned how to recognize the words help wanted in English. even though he didn't speak the language. And for reasons that we don't quite understand, he decided he wanted to become a cigar maker.
And so he saw the signs help wanted in the window of a little cigar shop in Cleveland, and he went in. And my great great grandmother paid the cigar maker to teach her son, my great-grandfather, how to become a cigar maker. and he started at the very bottom as an apprentice Sweeping the floors. getting coffee for the cigar workers, and learning the business from the ground up. And after a few years of this, he became a really good cigar maker.
But there was a big recession in the United States in 1895 and people all over the country lost their jobs, including my great-grandfather. but by that time he had a skill. He knew that he could use his two hands And roll tobacco into cigars and sell them and be able to provide for his family.
So with the help of his mother, my great Great grandmother. He got an order for 500 cigars from the grocery store around the corner where my family shops. And he borrowed $50 from other members of his family to buy some tobacco. to buy supplies and tools. He built a little table for himself in the barn behind the family house.
And he rolled those first 500 cigars. and started his own company. And from those first 500 cigars, From the very beginning of our company, now 125 years and four generations later, my family and I are still working to continue the legacy of my great-grandfather and to keep our family's cigar making tradition alive. And you're listening to True Newman tell the story of his great-grandfather and the story of J.C. Newman, which is the oldest family-owned premium cigar company in the country.
When we come back, More of this remarkable family business. and the story of the founder and the successors. here on Our American Story. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years.
And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q.
That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Most Mother's Day gifts end up in a drawer, but a song lives in the heart forever. This year, tryjoybox.com is giving away 1 million free custom songs to celebrate 1 million incredible moms. Just share a few memories, and Joybox produces an original track and greeting card just for her instantly. It's the most personal gift.
You'll ever give, and right now it's completely free. Make mom the star of her own song at tryjoybox.com. One million songs, zero dollars, only at tryjoybox.com. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.
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Newman Cigar Company, the oldest family-owned premium cigar business. in the nation. Let's get back to Drew Newman, the great-grandson of the founder. with a rest of this story. Of our company's 125 years in business, at least 100 of those have been what we call challenge years.
Years when business has been difficult. when we've had to struggle to survive and overcome challenges. The one that really jumps out in my mind is in 1961 when the Cuban embargo took effect. At that point, we were rolling cigars using almost entirely Cuban tobacco. In the 60s, Cuban tobacco was seen to be the best.
It's what consumers wanted, it's what we knew, and it's what everyone else is using here in the cigar city of Tampa. And overnight, with a stroke of a pen, President Kennedy imposed the embargo that cut off. Our supply of tobacco, cut off the raw materials, threatened our entire business and the entire American cigar industry. And it was a huge challenge. Thankfully, we had a stockpile of Cuban tobacco that lasted about a year.
So we had a little bit of time to figure out what to do, to test other tobaccos, to come up with a plan, and my grandfather was committed to making it work. My grandfather flew to France where the French government auctioned off tobaccos grown in Cameroon and West Africa every year. And my grandfather realized that Cameroon tobacco has a taste that's very similar to Cuban tobacco, and he decided to bring it to the United States and start rolling cigars with it. Using Cameroon tobacco, he was able to bring our company back from the brink of collapse and take it from a situation where we had a dwindling supply of raw materials to building the biggest premium cigar brand in the 1960s called the Questure No. 95, made with African Cameroon wrapper.
But the Cuban embargo is just one example of the challenges that we've faced. Uh In 2016, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided to expand its regulatory authority over all tobacco products. And in doing so, they decided to treat every type of tobacco product like cigarettes.
So whether it is a handcrafted premium cigar, A pipe. and e-cigarettes uh a cigarillo Any type of product, if it has tobacco in it, They're going to the government decided to regulate it like cigarettes. It's been an enormous challenge for the premium cigar industry because we're not like cigarettes. We don't sell Mass market products that are made on machine that are standardized and homogenized and use chemicals and flavors and so forth. We make an all-natural product.
By hand. in small batches. And so imposing this massive regulatory structure on our industry has been extraordinarily difficult. for a couple reasons. The cost of implementing these regulations can easily be spread out across the cigarette industry because they make billions and billions of cigarettes each year.
When we're making thousands of cigars per year, different types and in quantities, it's much harder to test all of them and to pay tens of thousands of dollars to test them, even though standards for testing cigars don't yet exist. That doesn't make sense, but that's kind of... That's the reflection of the situation right now. And so we're stuck in this. Regulatory purgatory.
FDA has said that they're not worried about premium cigars because their own data show that children don't smoke them. and that our consumers enjoy premium cigars infrequently.
However, we've been swept up into this regulatory mass. And they are subjected to the same requirements and restrictions as cigarettes. And so since 2016, we've been working to educate FDA, our leaders in Congress, and in the White House about what a premium cigar is. and what it's not And are working to ask the government just to recognize that premium cigars are different and to treat them differently. And so I spent a lot of my time in Washington, DC, just trying to educate folks about what our products are and how we make them and who enjoys them and how they're just different from every other type of tobacco product.
And I'm hopeful that in the end we will get some relief, but If we don't, it could be just catastrophic for our industry. Premium cigars. Are a tiny subset of the material. of the tobacco industry in the United States. Premium cigars make up approximately 1% of the overall cigar industry.
And 0.01% of the overall tobacco industry. in America. We're just a tiny, tiny tiny sliver. of family businesses Trying to keep the tradition of handcrafted premium cigars in America alive. Yeah.
We began offering tours of our cigar factory for the first time. And one of the things that really surprised me was that most of our visitors Don't smoke cigars. They don't even light cigars. But what they do like is history and tradition and families. And what our visitors see when they come to our 110-year-old cigar factory here in Tampa is a four-generation family business.
A hand craft that hasn't changed in a hundred years. They get to see how cigars are rolled in person and can roll them themselves. They get to learn about the history of Tampa, of the cigar industry, of my family. And so we're really excited to welcome visitors into our factory here in the cigar city of Tampa so they can see the American cigar making tradition in person and learn about it.
So, the cigar that we roll here in the United States by hand is called the American. The American is an old cigar brand that was first made in the 1880s in New York City. And when our El Relot factory here in Tampa opened in 1910, it was the first brand of cigars made in this building when it opened. And so, as we were creating this all-American handmade cigar a few years ago, we thought, What better name to give it? Then The American.
Which we roll here in our 110-year-old historic cigar factory in Tampa, Florida, using. All American tobaccos, and not only is each leaf grown in the United States, but every part of the package is made in America as well. Everything from the wood in the wood boxes To the inks and the papers and the cigar bands, the cigar labels, to the hinges on the boxes, to the cellophane tubes. All of it from start to finish is made here in the United States. But doing so is at an added cost.
Labor is more expensive, materials are more expensive, but we think it's worth it to keep the American cigar making tradition alive. And a special thanks to Drew Newman, who's the great-grandson of the founder of America's oldest family-owned premium cigar company, J.C. Newman. By the way, if you're ever in the Tampa area, be sure to visit the J.C. Newman Cigar Factory.
It's a must-see if you're in the area, and that means if you're heading to Orlando, it's not that far, or if you're hitting the Gulf Coast for some beach time. I'll head to the Tampa factory. It's a great attraction for the family. And as the great-grandson said, this was the American dream lived. What the great-grandfather did, and like so many family businesses, the next generation and the generation after it tried to keep that American dream alive.
A great, great American dreamer story, the J.C. Newman Cigar Company story, here on Our American Stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way.
The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q.
Most Mother's Day gifts end up in a drawer, but a song lives in the heart forever. This year, tryjoybox.com is giving away 1 million free custom songs to celebrate 1 million incredible moms. Just share a few memories, and Joybox produces an original track and greeting card just for her instantly. It's the most personal gift you'll ever get. And right now, it's completely free.
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