Perry White Pipes

Perry White Pipes is the American handmade briar pipe brand that Robert Perry "Bob" Swanson (1947-2020) ran alone in Florida. The name is not a company title but a family memory: Swanson took both his middle name and the brand's name from his grandfather, Perry White. Production never rose to a series scale at any point; the brand's renown rests less on total pipe count than on details of craftsmanship and the white ring repeated on every mouthpiece.

Swanson and His Relationship With Pipes

Swanson was born on February 10, 1947, in Bloomington, Minnesota. Most of his life was spent in work outside pipes: he worked in journalism in Minneapolis, worked in real estate in the same state, and turned to nursery growing after moving to Florida. He took up the pipe in 1967 and moved into collecting within the first years; he progressed from Falcon-type pipes, whose bowls screw onto a metal body, to Weber, and from there to the Charatan pipes he encountered at a pipe shop. This interest lasted a lifetime and culminated in his leading the founding, in 2006, of the International Charatan Collectors Society, an international collectors' group.

His entry into pipe making is credited to the friendship he formed with Dave Hunter, a repairman known around Minneapolis. By Swanson's own account, he made his first pipes at the end of 1975 at Hunter's encouragement, giving away the thirty or forty pipes he turned out at the time to friends; Hunter took on the mouthpiece fitting himself, since Swanson lacked the necessary equipment. Production soon dropped to one or two pipes a year, then stopped altogether. The brand's real period begins much later, in the Florida years. At this stage Swanson says he met Lee von Erck, who had taken over Hunter's bench, attended his seminars, and worked at his workshop in northern Michigan, taking his sense of symmetry from there. In which year regular production under the brand name began is not stated in sources.