TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have, as local readers might guess, been postponed.
When last I wrote about Emmett Watson, the dean of Seattle newspapermen, I described him as “possibly the greatest self-proclaimed hack writer in Northwest history.”
He was a helluva lot more than that.
He was a city’s chronicler, in a three-dot item column and occasional longer essays, then in three volumes of memoirs (all, alas, out of print).
He was also a city’s conscience, though he’d never admit to such a potentially pretentious appellation.
He would, however, freely admit to being a throwback to both the old days of newspapering and the old days of Seattle.
The former meant he was a master of the now largely-forgotten Art of the Column and the heritage of the classic newspaperman character type, the ink-stained wretch who drank with two fists and typed with two fingers. Watson wasn’t really like that, but he endearingly pretended to be such for droll-comic effect.
The latter meant he gave a damn about this once-forgotten corner of America and the humans of all social strata who inhabited it. He hobnobbed with the powerful, and dropped many a local-celeb name in his columns, but felt at home with the working stiffs, the unsung men and women who actually did things. (It’s sad but appropriate that his final published column appeared in last fall’s strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.)
Even his “Lesser Seattle” schtick, a running semi-gag about trying to “Keep the Bastards Out” and put the brakes on regional development, was really a not-so-disguised paean to the Seattle and the Northwest that he knew, the gruff but lovable place of honest curmuddgeons and simple dreamers–a culture he saw being steadily eroded, not just by loud-talkin’ Calif. immigrants but by local boosters who seemed to hate everything that was great about this place and desperately wanted to turn it into something “World Class” at any cost.
Watson tweaked and stretched the format of the three-dot column so it could say just about anything he wanted it to. He was outspoken (and on what I consider the right side of) just about every big political and social issue of the past half-century.
And it’s not an exaggeration to note that all I’ve done in this online (and sometimes print) column was an attempt, however misdirected and feeble, to try to write like he did.
NEXT: My print future.
ELSEWHERE:
