The Down East Seniors Club held their June 22 meeting at the Blind Center of North Carolina in Washington. President Ed Hamrick led the meeting. Jim Hackney played for the singing of “God Bless America” and Ed Bolen gave the invocation. Dick Paul provided humor.

Member Charles Lueck presented a program titled “Cigarette Smoke.” When he graduated from college in 1956 he accepted a position with DuPont as a chemist in their textile research department. In 1960 the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center determined that phenols in cigarette smoke are some of the major causes of lung cancer. They approached DuPont and asked them to search for an effective material that would filter the phenols from cigarette smoke before it is inhaled. Lueck was assigned this project. He tested many fibrous and powder materials by passing cigarette smoke through them and measuring the phenol content before and after filtration. He determined that cellulose acetate was by far the best material for this purpose. The only problem was that DuPont didn’t manufacture cellulose acetate. Because of this, the results of Lueck’s work were set aside and eventually misplaced. In 1963 Lueck left DuPont and went to work for Monsanto. About a year later Lueck’s file on the filter project was found; this led his former supervisor at DuPont to ask him to come back. He did and remained with them until his retirement.

Len Huber won the 50/50 drawing.