Pipe From Keens Steakhouse Is Claimed, and Smoked, Decades After Storage Bonnie Jenkins, general manager of Keens Steakhouse, had to search among 90,000 pipes to find the author's. IN 1976, my membership certificate for Keen's English Chop House's Pipe Club arrived in my parents" mailbox, a gift from my godfather, James Elkins McIlvain. I hadn't yet turned 2. I never did ask Uncle Jim whether the gesture was a hope that I, too, would one day puff away at his favorite hangout, or if he merely giggled at the image of an infant inhaling from such an instrument - it looked as if it should be filled with opium rather than aged tobacco - like some sort of diaper-clad burgher. Starting in 1885, when Albert Keen opened his restaurant and saloon, now known as Keens Steakhouse, the destination has provided post-dinner pipes to the likes of Babe Ruth, Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody. Keen, who managed the acting and literary society called the Lamb's Club, on West 36th Street, in what was then the theater district, opened up his self-named restaurant next door. Players at the nearby Garrick Theater would pop by, in full costume, and pound Glenmorangie as if it were Gatorade in between acts of their shows. The churchwarden pipes in question are roughly 15 inches long, emblazoned with the handwritten number assigned to each owner and kept on the premises, since they are far too fragile to transport. New members would receive their pipes, cards bearing the identifying digits and, back in the day, complimentary plum pudding delivered every Christmas. The most current models are made in Holland by a company called Royal Delta and are far more Shakespearean than Sherlockian in appearance. It is written that the "church" moniker comes from the old chapel officers, who created a stem long enough to reach out past the stained-glass windows so that they might smoke away during Mass. My mother recently found my card and letter of introduction in an old file cabinet ("his "churchwarden," bearing the above number, is in our custody and reserved for his use whenever he partakes in the tavern's hospitality" the probably now-dead manager wrote). My mother promptly mailed the documents to my Midtown apartment, whereupon I framed and nailed this little slice of the town's more tobacco-friendly past onto my least-stained wall, confident in the fact that I'd never actually locate the receptacle itself. Sadly, a long-ago office fire, along with a brief closing in 1979, compromised both Keens's files and, I assumed, any chances I had of reclaiming my slow-burning birthright. Or so I thought, until a waiter recently informed me that if I still had my registration number, (it's 98671), an employee could probably retrieve my yet-to-be-puffed present. "We're better off when we have a number, like in your case," Keens's general manager and default pipe wrangler, Bonnie Jenkins, said when I phoned her about my search-and-smoke mission. Ms. Jenkins has overseen daily operations at the restaurant since 1997, and has found long-lost clays - which are arrayed, in a confounding manner, along the expansive ceilings - for countless old regulars, their widows and memento-seeking children. Ms. Jenkins recalled a recent letter from a Royal Navy veteran who had been stationed in New York, in 1942: "He sent his pipe card, said he just wanted us to know that he always remembers Keens, and that it was a really special time in his life, even though there was a war going on," she said. Another woman wanted to find her dead father's pipe for her mother, Ms. Jenkins said. It took me two years, but I found it. I kept that fact in mind as the days turned into weeks after our initial conversation, as the "no dice" e-mails kept coming from Keens. Between the attic with its shelves full of haphazardly filed clays and the 90,000 churchwardens stashed above the old photos, newspaper clippings and other odd ephemera covering the restaurant's six expansive dining rooms, I was beginning to lose faith. Then, two weeks ago, I opened another e-mail from Ms. Jenkins, which stated simply, but ebulliently, "We found it!" My heart became as full as my lungs soon would be, as I smiled over the idea of a long-delayed meeting between pipe and person. I asked Ms. Jenkins if she ever found a clay for someone like me who had gotten it as a child, but had never actually seen the thing. She thought about it for a moment, and then replied, excitedly, "You're the first!"