Emmett Watson

Emmett Watson (November 22, 1918 – May 11, 2001) was an American newspaper columnist from Seattle, Washington, whose columns ran in a variety of Seattle newspapers over a span of more than fifty years. Initially a sportswriter, he is primarily known for authoring a social commentary column for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I) from 1956 until 1982, when he moved to The Seattle Times and continued there as a columnist until shortly before his death in 2001.

Watson grew up in Seattle during the 1920s and 1930s. He was a tireless advocate, through his column as well as through a fictional organization he created called Lesser Seattle, for limiting the seemingly unbridled growth and urban renewal that dramatically altered the city's landscape during the second half of the twentieth century. He often blamed his lack of success in professional baseball on his inability to hit a curveball. He graduated from the university in 1942 with a bachelor's degree in communications. The newsletter brought him to the attention of an editor at the Seattle Star (a now defunct daily newspaper) where Watson was hired to cover the Rainiers in 1944. It was while working at the Star that Watson contracted polio.

In 1946, The Seattle Times lured Watson away from the Star, where he continued to cover sports until 1950, when he received an offer from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that The Seattle Times chose not to match. He initially wrote a sports column at the P-I. By 1962, the column, primarily a "three dot" compilation of short items, was running five days a week. When a particular issue caught his attention, Watson would produce a longer, essay-style column. It was these essay-style columns that provided most of the fodder for his 1993 book, My Life in Print.

In his column and life in general, Watson was an early champion of civil rights, social reform, and the anti-war movement. the strike paper of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild.

Notable actions Reporting the suicide of Ernest Hemingway Watson received international notoriety in 1961 when he broke the story of novelist Ernest Hemingway's suicide in Idaho, which had initially been incorrectly reported by Hemingway's wife as an accidental shooting. It was the effectiveness of this action that proved to be instrumental in Seattle being awarded the Seattle Mariners in 1977.

Lesser Seattle Lesser Seattle is a fictional organization invented by Watson. It is also known for its KBO agents and supporters, where KBO stands for "Keep the Bastards Out". The organization expressed Watson's frustration with that of many other Seattle residents with the influx of newcomers to the Puget Sound area from out-of-state. Watson periodically wrote about the group in his column from 1957 to 1997. It was a satirical response to the pro-growth booster group Greater Seattle Inc., which had been founded in the 1950s. The organization is somewhat similar to the satirical James G. Blaine Society and Society of Native Oregon Born (S.N.O.B.) that advocated keeping migrating Californians out of nearby Oregon.

According to Lesser Seattle and the KBO, immigration of newcomers into the Puget Sound region clogged the roads, spent too much money bidding up prices, did not understand the "NorthWest way of life", and generally made trouble. Watson periodically suggested actions that KBO members could take to make "immigrants" (perhaps especially Californians) uncomfortable, and, hopefully, encourage them to leave. Readers and others occasionally observed that it was all a sort of joke; Watson sometimes responded that people could think what they liked, but that he would continue to promote the KBO as one way to deal with the decrease in the quality of life in the Pacific Northwest and especially in Western Washington.

Oyster Bar

Emmett, along with his friend Sam Bryant, opened the city's first oyster bar on February 18, 1979. Watson sold his share of the Oyster Bar to Bryant in 1987. Still in business today, Emmett Watson's Oyster Bar is located in Seattle's Pike Place Market and is currently owned by Sam Bryant's son, Thurman.

Death In March 2001, Watson underwent surgery for an abdominal aneurysm at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle and died of complications from the surgery on May 11 at the age of 82.

Accomplishments Watson was called "one of the greats" by contemporaries Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle and Jimmy Breslin of the New York Daily News; he considered himself a protégé of Caen's. He wrote four books (including My Life in Print) and received the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists' Western Washington Chapter in 1998.

Published works 1982 Digressions of a Native Son 1992 Once Upon a Time in Seattle 1993 My Life in Print 1994 Above Seattle (with Robert Cameron, photographer)