BY DON SHILLING

By DON SHILLING
VINDICATOR BUSINESS EDITOR
OMINIC FARINA CAN'T smoke his cigars at home, so he heads down to A.R.M. Cigars four or five times a week.
He lights up a long cigar and settles into a leather chair, joining a few other guys who also can't smoke at home.
The Boardman cigar lounge has 10 chairs arranged in a large circle so smokers can sit back and talk about football, politics and current events. Smokers come in every day at all hours, but early evening on Friday is the busiest.
"It's a little bit like Cheers -- everybody knows your name," said Farina, 50, of Boardman.
Savor the flavor
The men enjoy the conversation, but it's really the cigars that bring them back day after day. Much of society doesn't understand their love for the cigar -- savoring the flavor of the smoke in their mouths and enjoying the aroma as the smoke is exhaled.
Restaurants, work places and even their families don't want them around while they are enjoying their cigars. But at A.R.M., they are welcomed.
"It's like your family," Farina said.
Farina isn't alone. Enough people are looking for a place to smoke cigars that local cigar lounges are upgrading their businesses. Here is some of what happened this summer:
UIn Boardman, A.R.M. moved to a larger location just a stone's throw from a previous store on Market Street. The lounge area and the walk-in humidor are twice as big at the new store.
UIn Cortland, R Cigars doubled in size when it moved to a new location on Elm Road. The move out of the central city gave smokers some more elbow room in the lounge, provided more space for inventory and a walk-in humidor for the first time.
UIn Girard, Martin Seidler bought GoLong Cigar Store when the previous owner was considering closing it. He has expanded the inventory and bought new furniture.
Similar comparisons
While Farina compared the Boardman lounge to the Boston bar on the former NBC sit-com, others had similar comparisons for smoking lounges. They said it was like people of another era gathering around a pot-bellied stove or congregating at a country store.
Tony Marino, who owns A.R.M., said the swapping of stories makes it like a "beauty shop for a guy."
Bob Kosa, owner of R Cigars, said a mix of people, including professionals, union workers and retirees, come to the store to buy cigars that range from $1.50 to $19 each.
"It's a diverse group of people, but they all enjoy one thing -- smoking a good cigar," he said.
Interest in smoking cigars was revived in the mid-1990s when a cigar boom swept the country. Many people, including women who hadn't smoked before, started buying cigars, while longtime smokers bought more high-end cigars and started reading cigar magazines.
Demand has softened since the boom of the mid-1990s but is still stronger than it was before the boom, Marino said.
Despite the increased interest in cigars, health agencies advise against smoking them.
The downside
The American Cancer Society says cigar smoking causes cancers of the lip, tongue, mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus and lungs. It also says cigar smokers can become addicted to nicotine through oral membranes.
Cigar smokers at the local lounges said, however, that they don't feel threatened by cigars because the smoke isn't inhaled. Kosa said he smoked cigarettes years ago and developed a hacking cough. He said he doesn't have that now that he gave up cigarettes and smokes eight or nine cigars a day.
Kosa said his business has been growing 11 percent a year and could increase even more with his larger Elm Road store. He used to stock 150 different types of cigars but now has 250.
Andy Amodio, 63, of Champion, recalls walking into Kosa's original store six years ago just after it opened. The store had just three small display cases, but Amodio was so happy to find a place to smoke that he kept coming back.
He's been coming nearly every day for six years and is such a fixture at the store that he sometimes answers the phone for Kosa and arranges an annual golf outing for fellow customers that he calls the R Cigars Open.
Kosa started the business after retiring with 32 years of service at Delphi Packard Electric Systems. Sales are good enough now that he was able to buy the building he's located in, but the first year at his original store was tough, he said. He was able to survive only because he had his pension check from Packard.
Continued demand
Seidler, 40, of Girard, said he bought GoLong on East Liberty Street because he sees a continued demand for cigars and for a place to smoke them.
His store is smaller than the others, but he still squeezed in new leather furniture to seat eight. He also painted the walls.
"He's really upgraded this place tremendously," said customer John Demas, 72, of Girard.
Seidler left behind a career in sales and marketing and bought the store from Bob Courtney, who was going to close it because he had bought the Wonder Bar in Girard. Courtney retains a small ownership stake in the cigar shop.
Seidler said the store gives him the flexibility to work on his ticket brokering business and candy marketing plans, but so far the cigars have kept him hopping. He said he's at the store seven days a week, working nearly 70 hours except when he takes an afternoon off to go golfing in the summer.
"It's a lot of fun. It's not like I'm getting up and going to work. It's like going to be with friends," he said.
That's a common sentiment at a cigar lounge.
Time to chat
Robin Percic, 24, is the manager at A.R.M. and enjoys chatting with the customers even though it's rare that another woman stops by to hang around.
"I don't look at it like a job. When I get my work done, I can come out and talk. There's not too many jobs where you can do that," she said.
Marino got into the tobacco business in the 1980s by running Tinder Box franchises in the Southern Park and Eastwood malls. He later opened his own tobacco-related businesses, as well as retail stores in other fields, before he found the right formula with A.R.M.
The key is offering low prices and being knowledgeable about the product, he said. He has been to Honduras to attend classes put on by a manufacturer and is sending Percic for the same training next year.
He stays on top of trends and says pipe smoking is gaining popularity again. He offers a variety of tobacco blends, including some that he has mixed himself.
Mark Talaganis, a 44-year-old Poland resident who visits A.R.M. six or seven days a week, said the real key to the store's success is the relaxed, friendly atmosphere. He said it provides people from all backgrounds with a place to gather with the one thing that binds them together -- cigars.
"There's a lot of good friendships here," he said.
shilling@vindy.com