When Oxmoor Center opened in 1971, it was the largest shopping mall in Kentucky, and it touted its line-up of more than 50 stores.
A half-century later, just one of the originals is still there.
It’s easy to overlook the Oxmoor Smoke Shoppe if you aren’t looking for it. The family-owned retailer’s cozy storefront can’t be more than 400 square feet, and it’s dwarfed by the nearby Dick’s Sporting Goods and the giant Pink Tag Boutique.
During the past decade, the mall has welcomed a surge of high-tech entertainment tenants. Mallgoers are donning virtual reality glasses at the new Immersive Gamebox and teeing up with Puttshack’s digitally-tracked golf balls, but crossing the threshold into Oxmoor Smoke Shoppe feels like turning back the clock.
There aren’t bar codes on the fine cigars lining the humidor, and the staff punches in product numbers by hand on an old-school cash register. The loose tobacco is weighed on the same, metal, non-digital scale used since Oxmoor first opened.
Really, only one major thing has changed at the mall’s last original tenant over the decades.
J. Paul Tucker, the shop’s beloved proprietor since 1974, died in 2023 after a quick, brutal battle with pancreatic cancer.
His wife, Sandy, however, is still spending some shifts behind the counter, welcoming folks into the shop as though it’s the living room in their home.
Sandy, 77, smiled and waved me in as I walked past the stack of handmade wooden cigar boxes that tower near the doorway and the counter full of limited-edition tabletop humidors that ― to my very untrained eye ― looked more like elaborate jewelry boxes.
Make no mistake, stepping into Oxmoor Smoke Shoppe is more like stepping into an art gallery or a fine wine store than one of the many vape shops on Bardstown Road.
She’d invited The Courier Journal to visit based on her business’s longevity but was quick to tell me “You might have bigger fish to fry” as I stepped up to the counter. She rattled off several mom-and-pop businesses in Louisville that were decades older than hers, and kindly, encouraged me to do some research on them as well.
Sandy is right, of course, we have wonderful legacy businesses here.
But it was Oxmoor Smoke Shoppe’s continuous presence in the ever-shifting mall that brought me to this half-century-old gem. The Tuckers have also owned locations in Owensboro, Cincinnati, and even along Bardstown Road, and all these years later, the Oxmoor Center shop is the one that stuck.
Sales have increased every year in the mall since the cigar boom in the 1990s, Sandy told me. Pipes have faded in and out in popularity, but recently they’ve seen a resurgence. Sometimes customers are nostalgic and eager to smoke like their grandfathers smoked, and in other cases, it’s the desire for the relaxed, ritual that comes with enjoying a pipe. Smoking a pipe isn’t something you rush, she explained.
Back in the 1980s or 1990s, the Oxmoor Smoke Shoppe even helped the Jeffersontown Gaslight Festival run a pipe smoking contest where contestants would line up on a porch and see who could leisurely smoke and keep one lit the longest.
The Tuckers weathered the upheaval of brick-and-mortar retail in the early 2010s when other tenants struggled against retail giants like Amazon and left the mall in droves. Most customers hear about the store through word-of-mouth, and many of their customers have been shopping with them for decades.
Paul was about 27 years old when he purchased Oxmoor Smoke Shoppe at the then three-year-old mall. At the time, the business was located in a small space in the mall’s old mezzanine, and he’d been working nextdoor at Oxmoor’s cheese store, Sandy said. He borrowed $5,000 from his parents for the down payment. In the early days, he couldn’t afford to pay employees, so he worked all the hours himself.
That paid off in more ways than one.
He was behind the counter in 1975 when Sandy stopped in to buy a lighter as a gift for a different gentleman, who she was dating at the time. When that love interest didn’t like that gift, she returned it, and she and Paul struck up a conversation about Corvettes. Paul was there, again, when she came back a few months later after the other relationship had fizzled out.
That time, she left with a birthday gift for her father and a date with Paul.
Paul’s 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. hours at the mall made for interesting courtship, she remembered, laughing. She reached under the counter and pulled out a 10-pound bag of tobacco, and recalled how back in the day she’d use one as a pillow for a quick nap behind the counter in the late evenings during inventory. The shop’s hours clashed with her job in insurance. Even so, they married in 1977. She mostly managed the booking keeping, she said, but in the 45-year marriage, she went to all the cigar conventions with him and worked in the store intermittently and during holidays.
Paul was the heart of the business, but she’s always had a deep relationship with her staff, the suppliers, the customers, and the product, too.
Ninety-nine percent of her cigars come from the Caribbean Islands, and many are made in factories that started with tobacco seeds that families took with them when they fled Cuba. Human hands plant the seeds, cut the tobacco leaves, and hang the leaves to dry and age, she explained. Those leaves are inspected, rolled, pressed, capped, and banded by hand, too, to make the cigar.
“I tell people before you put that cigar in your mouth, it has probably been touched a person 30 or 40 times from the beginning,” she explained.
A seasoned smoker can even catch the nuances in the cigars crafted by a veteran roller and someone new to the job, she said. There really is an art to it, and from the consumer perspective, there’s a thrill of the hunt to buy them, too. Oxmoor Smoke Shoppe is one of 150 stores in the United States and the only retailer in Kentucky that carries the Patoro line of cigars, Sandy said. Their Caballeros and Tucker 1616 lines are even more rare. She says they’re the only retailer that carries them in the country.
Naturally, at 77 years old Sandy doesn’t expect to spend another half-century working at the mall, but for the moment, she doesn’t expect to leave, either.
“When Paul passed away that was one of the things everyone asked,” she said. “I wasn’t sure how the store was going to do, and if it would fall apart without him.”
But all their regulars kept coming, and she accepted their condolences through watery eyes.
That hasn’t changed, and really, it only takes a step into the humidor to realize why.
There’s an old sign taped to a shelf in Paul’s handwriting that says “Cuba wished, they had this cigar.”
Fifty years after he bought the store, his vision is still alive and well in the mall, even more than a year after his death.
Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you’ve got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-4053. Follow along on Instagram @MaggieMenderski.