Two different friends forwarded gift links to this article in The Atlantic. It’ll probably be paywalled for most of you but I embedded the link in the image just the same, so give it a click and maybe you’ll be able to read it.
But if all you can get is the headline, don’t make the assumption I made, that it reflects the author’s argument. You know, that no one needs more than one watch (if that), and that a $20 watch does everything a $500,000 watch does (and maybe more). Sure, all that is true, if no fun. But on reading, it turns out the author grew up in the era of cheap digital Casio watches and his short magazine piece is a love letter to those square black plastic beeping gizmos with buttons on their corners. Which I totally get. Because I love cheap watches too, just not the same type.
I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, when wristwatches were round and mechanical. Dad gave me my first one when I was ten or eleven. We were living in Germany then and I remember it well: a Junghans (a brand that’s still around, and not cheap either) with marks on the dial but no numbers, a very grown-up watch for a boy, and I was proud of it.
I don’t remember the first watch I ever bought for myself, but I’d have been in my teens and it was most likely a Timex from the rack at Woolworths. Oddly enough, I do remember buying a gold Speidel Twist-O-Flex band for it. By then the Junghans was long gone. The big brands I remember from those days are Timex, Hamilton, Bulova, and Longines.
When I joined the Air Force in 1973, they issued me a mechanical pilot’s watch: round and black with white numbers and hands. I wore it through a year of pilot training and the three years afterward, when I flew trainers as an instructor. When I got my first fighter assignment in 1978, Donna took me to the base exchange and bought me a proper fighter pilot’s watch: my first Seiko, ditto round, ditto mechanical (automatic this time, the first one that didn’t need to be wound by hand every day). I still have that Seiko, today a collector’s item, and wear it often.
It was around then, the late 1970s, that I began to notice Casios. A lot of my squadron mates wore them. Occasionally one would go off during commander’s call or a mass briefing, emitting annoying beeps and entire songs, and you couldn’t tell whose watch it was coming from because the sound seemed to emanate from everywhere and of course the guilty party would pretend nothing was happening. I took a dislike to Casios.
I got over it, though, and since then have owned a few. These are my “overflow” watches, the ones that don’t fit in the display case with the rest of my collection. Four are Casios and one is a Timex. See? I still like cheap watches and happily sing their praises. My collection is eclectic and includes both mechanical and quartz watches, but what they all have in common are traditional dials and hands. I’m Team Analog. Because like a duckling imprinting on the first cat or dog to walk by after it opens its eyes, I imprinted on a 1950s Junghans.
Of course there’s a new generation now, one that imprinted on newer tech. I had an appointment at my dermatologist’s office last week and noticed all the twenty-something techs and assistants were wearing Apple watches. The doctor, somewhere in his fifties, was wearing … a $20 digital Casio.