Emmett Watson

Born in Seattle in 1918, Watson and twin brother Clement were the sons of Garfield and Lena McWhirt.[1] Emmett's mother and twin brother died of Spanish Influenza the following year; his father, an itinerant laborer unable to care for his 14-month-old son, arranged for Emmett's adoption by long-time friends John and Elizabeth Watson of West Seattle.[1][3]

Watson suffered an ear infection as a child that permanently damaged his hearing. He attended West Seattle High School before transferring to Franklin. A catcher on the Quakers baseball team, he played with future major league pitcher Fred Hutchinson,[1] and graduated in 1937.[4]

Watson enrolled at the University of Washington and played baseball for the Huskies under head coach Tubby Graves. He played very briefly with the Seattle Rainiers of the Pacific Coast League, amassing one hit in a total of two at-bats.[5] 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.[6] After leaving baseball, Watson worked in the Seattle-Tacoma Shipyard during World War II.

During the war, Watson and some friends produced a newsletter to send to baseball players serving in the military.[3] 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.[4]

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.[4] In 1956 the P-I was pitched the idea of an "Around the Town" column by a group of restaurant owners, who offered to partially underwrite the costs of producing the column in exchange for an occasional plug. The new column, "This, Our Town," was assigned to Watson.

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.[1]

Watson and long-time friend U.S. District Judge Bill Dwyer were leaders in the anti-trust suit against Major League Baseball, when the Seattle Pilots were moved to Milwaukee after a single expansion season in Seattle in 1969.[9] It was the effectiveness of this action that proved to be instrumental in Seattle being awarded the Seattle Mariners in 1977.

Lesser Seattle is a fictional organization invented by Watson.[11][12] 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.[13] Watson periodically wrote about the group in his column from 1957 to 1997.[14] It was a satirical response to the pro-growth booster group Greater Seattle Inc., which had been founded in the 1950s.[15] 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.