The Home for Retired Cigar Czars Just Lost an Associate Member – Ed McVey

Ed wasn’t a genuine Czar, but he worked in the industry for over 50 years starting out for Bering Corral Wodiskya y Ca., and then for me for about 20 years. 

A long time ago, back when I still had a full head of hair, the Bering Plaza was the absolute king of all cigars, and the one size alone sold over seven million cigars a year. In fact, they were so popular, that when I was a kid working in my father’s United Cigar Store, we would just dump a couple of boxes of 50 Plazas on the counter at lunchtime because half the customers would come in to buy 4 plazas for a buck! This was a 6 inch by 42 ring gauge cigar with a candela wrapper. Sure… there were a couple of other popular 4 for a buck cigars; the Garcia Vega Napoleon, the Gold Label Palma, the Seidenberg After Dinner, and the Webster Mayfairs, but the Plaza outsold them all.

Anyway, Ed worked for the Corral Brothers for many years until one day, while making a sales call on my company, he said that the next time he came in he would introduce me to his next “boss”. The Corral Brothers had asked him to train his next boss! Can you believe that?  Train his next boss? Well, Ed was really pissed off, and so I said to him: “Listen, I don’t know what your salary is with the Corrals, but I do know they are the cheapest pricks I have ever run into, so, why don’t you come and work for us? Bring me your last paycheck and I’ll pay you 20% more than you were making with Corral!” And so, he did!

I put Ed in charge of buying most of the machine-made cigars… Phillies, Dutch Masters, A&C’s, and the like — and he was phenomenal at it. There was never a price that was low enough for Ed and he was way, way better than me buying the domestic stuff because I was always concerned about our vendors losing money on deals with us, where with Ed, even if you gave him something for free he would want you to pay the freight in!

I was always concerned with Ed’s health because he was more than an employee, he was a friend. In fact, I considered most of the people I worked with to be “friends”. I (actually, we) – it’s we because my wife, LaVonda, and our key executives were always front and center when we heard of an employee that needed help.

Well, Ed was massively overweight, 300 plus pounds, and so I made Ed a bet: 50 dollars a pound for every pound you lose or gain… and remember this was like 40 years ago when 50 dollars was like two hundred and fifty of today’s dollars. We’ll weigh you today, and then at the end of the year we’ll re-weigh you.

Drum roll please…

At the end of the year Ed owed me One Thousand Three Hundred and Fifty Dollars!

I’m sure Ed’s up there in Heaven in the Smoking Section…

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