Walt Odets Made Me Do It

The best friend I never met.

One of the planes Walt Odets mentions flying in Out of the Shadows: the Beechcraft Baron, introduced in 1961 and discontinued only this year.

I think the first time I ever read anything by Walt Odets was sometime around the year 2000, more or less. I was a full time stay-at-home dad at the time, and had taken up watchmaking as a hobby in the very late 1990s, and was (partly thanks to running through the Timezone.com online watch school) having fun tinkering with watches in my spare time. I thought watches were fascinating little machines, and figuring out how they worked and how to work on them was enormously satisfying, as anyone who has fixed something broken successfully can attest. Walt Odets was someone whom I knew nothing about, except what I could glean through his watch writing, which generally did not have a whole lot of personal or biographical information in it, although there were exceptions – he started out one of my favorites, “Tweaking The IWC Mark XII,” like so:

“In the 1970’s, I was a pilot flying printing plates, bags of canceled checks, and the occasional dead body, also in a bag. People wanted their magazines and definitely wanted their money. And some died away from home, and their families or loved ones wanted their bodies back. Thus, I flew three nights a week and moved all these things around to try and make everyone happy. It was a lot of work, I got paid $12.00 an hour, and, of course, we were constantly timing things. Having only the most cursory interest in wrist watches at the time, I used an Omega SeaMaster my aunt had given me on college graduation and left it at that. At $12.00 an hour, it was a very fancy watch indeed. And we had a pretty good Davtron timer in the panel anyway.”

I didn’t realize it at the time but that would be the best opening paragraph for a watch story that I would read for a very long time, and as an opener, I think it’s still pretty hard to beat. (Jason Heaton once wrote a story for me when I was at Revolution Magazine USA, which started: “‘Coast Guard, this is Motor Vessel Bonsai, we have a missing diver in the water. Repeat, missing diver.’ I scanned the choppy water as we motored in increasing arcs, realizing the near impossibility of spotting a person in the two-meter swells. I’d rehearsed this scenario in my head a hundred times but nothing could prepare me for the sense of dread I was feeling,” which is probably the most gripping start to a watch review … ever, I think).

It was the opening graf of a piece about adjusting a watch: the IWC Mark XII, which became a must-have watch for me thanks to the story (I still don’t have one. Subsequent Mark models largely put me off because of the abandonment of the Mark XII handset in favor of the Spitfire style hands). The tweaking story itself is a complicated one and it was almost shocking to read, because the adjustments that Walt was making to the movement – which on top of everything else, was a donor movement from an Ingenieur which he felt the Mark XII deserved as it was better finished – were exacting and well beyond any technical capabilities I had then or have acquired since then: tiny adjustments to the centering of the balance spring; polishing pivots that already looked fine at 35x magnification, and on and on. Velociphile has done us all a service by putting links to all of Walt’s articles for Timezone.com in one story and as with reading the Discworld series, you can kind of start anywhere but if you want a quick immersion in why Walt’s writing was and still is the gold standard for enthusiast watch reviews, I can’t think of a better place to start.

To say I wanted to be Walt Odets when I grew up is to say nothing at all – I didn’t have (and still don’t have) his budget, his tools, or his absolute disinterest in the tendency brands have to think that any and everything they produce deserves to get put on the refrigerator with a gold star on it – but I did the best I could with the means that I had and I figured, if I couldn’t have his workshop or his collection, I could at least try to emulate his appetite for and fascination with the technical problems which define what mechanical horology can and cannot do. Walt was not averse to lavishing praise where he felt it was deserved, but he was also not averse to noting when a watch that was praiseworthy in some respects, let the team down in other respects; and the fine distinctions which he drew on so many occasions, were drawn, you felt, not to show off his knowledge or to position himself as any sort of final authority, but rather to add depth to the collective discussions then taking place on the internet over what points might differentiate one high quality watch from another.

This sort of thing is unknown today. It would require someone with Walt’s talents as a writer, and knowledge as a watchmaker, and confidence in their own skills, to do what he did and I don’t think what he did is realistically reproducible.

What I do miss, though, is the perspective. The idea that minute differences between the crispness of the finishing on keyless works, for instance, might affect the consensus on the value of one watch vs. another, is despite the obsession with finishing, a totally alien one to most enthusiasts today and while finishing which has been exaggerated from historical workshop standards, to an end in itself, is the subject of a lot of chitchat, it largely exists outside the context of what finishing means functionally, and what it means as part of the overall picture. It’s fine to say that everyone approaches collecting in their own way, but if all you think about is sharp inner corners, or case design, or rarity, or investment potential, you’re missing out on seeing the whole object in its larger context, and the emphasis brands place on social media activations has pretty much shut the door on intelligent discourse about watches as objects which ought not to be reduced to a couple of wrist shots and hashtags.

I don’t think I’ve ever sat down to write about a watch without thinking about Walt at least in passing. I admire his rigor; I admire his thoroughness; I admire his ability to be entertaining in the midst of pursuing technical precision. It’s a funny thing, though – speaking of seeing things in a larger context – that I spent a quarter century admiring his writing without reading Out of the Shadows: Re-imagining Gay Men’s Lives, which was published in 2019 (already seven years ago!) or his earlier 1995 book, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS. I’m trying to make up for lost time, and am now reading both (characteristically, in reverse order, and my good intentions aside the first thing I did when I cracked the cover of Out of the Shadows was look for more information on how he’d become a pilot).

One of my favorite of all his stories, though, is about a watch which nobody nowadays would give a second glance – a Cornavin Dolphin, which was the subject of the story, “Jessica’s Cornavin Dolphin.” The story was written after the publication of Walt’s (in)famous Rolex Explorer review, and its subject is a Cornavin Dolphin watch, which was somewhat enigmatic even to Walt – Jessica was a friend of his who was working as a waitress in New York at the time, and who got the watch for free from a Canal Street dealer who took pity on her after witnessing a fight she had with her boyfriend. (In the story, Walt wrote: “What is a Cornavin Dolphin? I don’t know.”) The price for the watch originally was not exactly exorbitant: one dollar, which Walt points out was a bargain even by 1974 standards – and when he opened the watch up, he described the condition of the movement as “absolutely filthy” and “literally swimming in moisture.” Walt wrote that when he got to it, the Dolphin was 24 years old (which means he took the back off in 1998, which sounds about right) and that much to his surprise, it was apparently fine:

“‘It runs fine,” Jessica assured me, ‘except that every month I have to set it back because it’s two minutes fast.’”

“On my electronic timer, it looked just as Jessica had described it: plus two seconds a day and strong as an ox. Beyond the inconvenience of resetting monthly–and, of course, the nomadic seven marker [which had become detached years before and was floating around under the crystal like a cut-rate Happy Diamond] –Jessica had no complaints at all. Amazing.”

The story takes some swipes at the Rolex caliber 3000 and Walt takes a certain amount of obvious glee in making otious comparisons between it, and the (I think Russian, probably a Vostok caliber from what I’ve been able to find out) movement in the Dolphin. What I took away from the story, though, was a lesson which John Davis, a long-time watch world friend and a fellow admirer of Walt’s, articulated very well in his detailed movement analysis of the 7S36 caliber found in the Seiko SKX007, when he wrote at the outset:

“Watches are machines.”

Walt’s writing inspired me partly because he never lost sight of that fact, and never gave up on the idea that the extent to which a watch fulfills its identity as a machine is essential to evaluating and understanding it. This is not to say that there is a single standard by which all watches can be judged, or that there is some sort of clearly defined hierarchy of quality. It does mean, though, that watches can and do reward serious study and serious interest in how their makers do or do not ensure that the values the watch announces in its externals, are reflected in its internals. Watches are not just machines (whatever that means – the USS Iowa and the Large Hadron Collider are not just machines either, and even the humblest plumber’s snake may have a story to tell – but they’re not not machines, either.

The Cornavin Dolphin story takes a step back from, and a longer look at, what might be dismissed as a forgettable, cheap watch by ninety-nine per cent (at least) of all watch enthusiasts, and from its dirty, damp condition, Walt was able to extract a story of remarkable consistency and, one could almost say noble, performance in the face of adversity. I have not, historically, been very good at expressing my appreciation to folks whose work has affected me – I thought for years of writing a fan letter to M.F.K. Fisher, whose work was a comfort to me during hard times growing up, but she died in 1992 and of course it was too late. I never wrote to Walt and told him how much his work made mine possible, shadow though it is of his crisp language and technical acumen, but I feel as if the least I can do is read his books and pay homage to the man, by finally making an attempt to know who he was as a person as well as I felt I knew him as a watch enthusiast.

More on Walt Whitman Odets:

• A tribute to Walt Odets on Screw Down Crown.

• A full list with live links to all his stories for Timezone.com, via Velociphile

• Walt Odets: The Father of the Formal Watch Review, at New York Times.

• Struggling With Integrity: a 2010 interview with Walt Odets that covers memories of his family and father, the controversial Clifford Odets.

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