10th Anniversary Post: Remembering Watson, the World's Best Dog

Some long stories begin as short stories.  When architect intern Ben Lochridge left our office for graduate school in 2008, he took his dog Buster with him.  I missed having a dog around the office to walk during breaks (not that I didn't miss Ben) and decided that while I was still too busy with work to adopt a dog, a substitute plan could be volunteering to walk dogs on Saturdays for the local Humane Society.  After I walked dogs awhile, someone on the staff suggested I take special training and work in the recovery section of the vet clinic.  There I would take care of dogs and cats emerging from anesthesia after surgery.  I'd take their temperatures, clean out their ears, see if nails needed clipping, and calm them as they'd awaken.

Six months into my six years there, the staff plopped a pup into my lap named Monday because that was the day he'd transferred from Denver's Dumb Friends League.  The vet said he was a Treeing Walker Coonhound / Lab mix.  I looked up Walker Coonhounds and they just looked like tall beagles to me.  He wasn't available for adoption because of a skin rash and food-guarding issues.  Naturally, I had to have him, and took him home on Feb. 22, 2009.  Nine months after adopting the pup I named Watson Sherman he felt so much like family we made a Christmas card to send friends.  Watson's first name came from a beagle a pal had long ago named after Doc Watson, the musician.  Watson's middle name was a character from an old TV cartoon series about Rocky (a flying squirrel) and Bullwinkle (a moose).  Dogs need middle names so you can say, "Watson Sherman, get off that school bus!"  More on that later...

After this 2010 Christmas card, we face a year of misadventures.  Near Christmas, Watson hits a metal display at the hardware store, injuring his right eye, but a trip to the emergency vet at illegal speeds saves his vision with medicated goo. In the summer of 2011, we encounter a mountain lion when walking after dark on our block.  Watson stops and  looks up into a tree maybe 25 feet away.  Seeing the green glint of the eyes and the tail curling down, and realizing we don't have wild monkeys in Colorado, I pull him back and we walk home, while I turn around frequently to see if the big cat follows.  The next morning, we see what looks like a stuffed toy on the lawn across the street from the tree where we'd seen the lion.  Approaching it, I realize it's the remains of one of two fawns that had sheltered in our yard, and then call the Division of Wildlife.  Not long after, they catch a cougar near University Hill.  Just before Thanksgiving, Watson barks and barks at 3 AM until this writer (who sleeps like a hibernating bear) finally rolls out of bed and runs downstairs to discover someone trying to break open the front door.  When the fast-arriving police open the door, the latch falls out.  Score two saves for Watson (you count that lion, right?) and one for Papa (well, I did adopt him).

By this time Watson has acquired a best puppy friend in Lovie the Lab (background above) and we spend lots of time with Lovie's best human friend Isaac in the corner park.  Also, later in 2011 Ben finishes grad school and brings Buster to the office.  He's seated and looking angelic below, while Watson stands near a tennis ball he's demolished.  One day we have all three dogs at the office, running up and down the stairs, chasing the ball and making noise, and eventually Ben looks a little flustered.  I need to go meet an engineer, though, so I just tell Ben to call Animal Control if it gets too hectic around here...

California work continues, so Watson and I take road trips out to Monterey County, Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley.  When in Monterey, WS stays at Casa de Amigos while I visit construction sites.  He doesn't even look back at me as he goes through the front door, because Casa de Amigos apparently gives him a chance to be a leader of a pack...

One day I'm walking WS on our block and he decides to get on the school bus.  The kids start yelling, "Let's take him to school; we'll bring him back" and the bus driver just laughs.  I pull Watson off and he gives me a look of injured dignity.  He's pretending that he was there to cheer up the kids on their way to school, but I know he was mainly there to sniff the lunch boxes.  When we get home, he pouts for a good while...

Somewhere along the line I figure that humans must have been kind to Watson in his 2.5 months of puppy life before I adopted him, because he rolls over on his back and patiently waits for belly rubs even when he meets a total stranger.  Sometimes in a completely inappropriate place, like the middle of a driveway, for example...

Things are serene and peaceful on our California trips; maybe too serene for Watson.  In 2018 we need to rescue him when he jumps onto a roof.  In Los Gatos, we visit a friend to discuss a remodel, and WS dashes to the end of the driveway before I realize there's no guardrail to protect anyone from the 8-foot drop (a code violation, actually).  WS somehow sees the danger (or is lucky) and leaps across the 3-foot space onto the roof of a garden shed.  I yell at him to stay (unlike in obedience class, he stays) and we get a ladder to carry him down.  Later, at Lulu's Café in Santa Cruz, he celebrates his luck by fooling some admiring kids into thinking he's a puppy and giving him belly rubs...

One of Watson's favorite places in Boulder was Trident Booksellers and Café, where he could collect loving attention, including belly rubs and treats, from college students.  I could bring him to the Trident and get lots of work done on my computer, because he'd barely notice I was there...

WS had a kind of agelessness about him, and so much energy we nicknamed him the Permapup.  We'd play Special Ball in a usually-abandoned tennis court with a Kong toy (think of stacked doughnut shapes of decreasing size) and he liked guessing which way it would bounce.  Catching the ball on the first bounce yielded an extra treat; Watson learned that rule quickly.  When he got the ball, he'd huff and chuff and toss his head like a prancing pony... 

The photo below shows a sleepy nap on a California road trip when Watson was 11 years old.  I'd still get requests from complete strangers "to pet the puppy." I'd tell them that Watson was scamming them, and puppyhood was a decade behind him, but of course they could pet him. Before I'd get the words out, though, he'd be on his back, waiting and wagging.

The photo below was taken in summer of the same year, 2020, after the Pandemic arrived.  Watson managed to stay in fine shape because longer walks filled a vacant schedule. Four or five walks a day led to extra food, and I'd started cooking for him, which turned out to be cheaper than buying "premium" dog food...  

Watson was ready to take a ride in the old Jag to celebrate his 16th birthday back in December, on a day with oddly springlike conditions.  When springtime actually arrived, he kept on doing his job of making new friends.  One day, an RTD bus driver got off at our stop on Broadway, and I thought he was going to help a passenger with the lift.  But the driver introduced himself as Mike and said, "I see you walking all the time, and I just wanted to pet your dog."   In the summer Watson slowed down and we took shorter and slower walks in the shady gardens. Then he got some intestinal bug we fought with our vet's help for weeks, and last Friday night he heaved up his dinner and made some loud groans that I'd never heard from him.  I took him to the Humane Society vets the next day, and a vet who'd known us both from the beginning said, "If this were my dog I'd let him go today, because he's in real discomfort."  He ate some cheese treats with his usual enthusiasm, and I held him while he went to sleep for the last time.  Watson, it was a gift to know you.  I'll always be grateful to you for our 66 seasons of walks in all kinds of weather and landscapes, for improving my pitching arm, and for making me new friends in all those seasons. For the rest of my days, just hearing your name will be like getting a letter from home.

Note to readers:  

This post, #402, marks the 10th year from the start of this blog, which has so far received over 340,000 visits. Though it is mostly concerned with subjects like car design, architecture, movies, painting and photography, a subject like adopting a dog (and not just a dog, but the world's best dog) seemed to fit under the Art of Living category.  

Photo Credits:  

All photos are by the author except for the following:

Top:  Helen Andrews

3rd from top:  Humane Society of Boulder Valley

6th from top:  Casa de Amigos, Monterey, CA

2nd from bottom:  Veronika Sprinkel

Local Heroes: Sebring Winners at the Revs Institute

The Revs Institute in Naples, Florida is only 118 miles from the Sebring racetrack in the south-central part of the state.  The Cunningham* C4-R in their Collier Collection won the 1953 Sebring 12 Hours and was the first American car to do so.  It was built by B.S. Cunningham & Co. only 110 miles from Sebring, in West Palm Beach.  This meant that their Sebring effort was more convenient for the Cunningham team to stage than the one for their other target endurance race, the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Briggs Cunningham's C4-R racers, powered by a Weber-carbureted, 300 hp version of Chrysler's 331 hemi V8, were 900 lb. lighter, 6" narrower and 16" shorter than the previous C2, and came closer to his goal of winning at Le Mans than any other cars built by the team.  They were handicapped by the lack of disc brakes, but still took 4th place there in 1952, and 3rd as well as 5th place in 1954. The team did even better at home, where the C4 cars won a high percentage of races entered, including at Sebring, where John Fitch and Bill Spear won with this car, one of two alloy-bodied C4-R roadsters and a Kamm-tailed coupe called the C4-RK, also at the Revs, which has the best collection of Cunninghams anywhere.  

The surprise winner at the next year's Sebring was another local hero in a way, though it came from Italy.  Briggs Cunningham's team had acquired this 1954 OSCA* MT4 1500 from Alfred Momo's operation in NYC, where Momo's shop added the scalloped cutouts to the front fenders for brake cooling.  What they didn't need to add to the Maserati Brothers' handiwork was lightness.  The alloy-bodied OSCA on an 86" wheelbase weighed just 1,280 lb. compared with the Cunningham C4-R's 2,900.  Its 88.6 cu. in. inline four was more efficient at making power than Chrysler's hemi; with dual overhead cams and 8 spark plugs it made 130 hp, almost 1.5 per cubic inch.  Many of little car's competitors brought over twice the power to the race, including the C4-R, private Jaguar and Ferrari entries, the Aston Martin factory team, and the Lancia team's D24s, which experts favored to dominate it...

But the Cunningham team's OSCA entry brought more than lightness and mechanical efficiency to the fight...

Cunningham lined up a driver named Stirling Moss and partnered him with Bill Lloyd.  It was the English driver's first time racing an Italian car. Moss and Lloyd did well in practice, but their best lap times were over 20 seconds slower than the fastest Ferrari and Lancia, so nobody predicted the occupants of this tight little cockpit would win...

In the race, though, the blistering pace sidelined many of the more powerful competitors, while Moss, Lloyd and OSCA delivered a steady, reliable performance.  At the finish, the Moss / Lloyd OSCA was an astonishing 5 laps ahead of the 2nd place Lancia D24.  Moss captured the attention of American racers, and so did OSCA, because their MT4s finished in 4th and 5th place  as  well.  Overnight, SCCA drivers who could afford the $9K to $10K price wanted an OSCA.

Most of the roughly 6 dozen MT4s built featured OSCA's trademark "cheese grater" grille, and, unlike early Fifties Lancias and Ferraris, usually had left-hand drive.  Below we see the winning MT4 with the hood closed...

Ford followed in the tracks of Cunningham's '53 and Chaparral's '65 victory with their own '66 win at Sebring, becoming the 3rd American-engined car to take the checkered flag.  Unlike the C4-R and the Chevy-powered Jim Hall / Hap Sharp Chaparral 2A, the Ford GT-40* Mk. II had its chassis built outside the US (in England).  The Revs Collier Collection doesn't contain the GT-40 roadster driven to victory by Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby because it no longer exists.  But it has this GT-40 Mk. II coupe, which after all won the Reims 12 Hours two weeks after retiring at Le Mans, so we're giving them credit for having a good specimen of the 427-powered beast, which is displayed with a lighter, 289-powered GT-40 Mk. I.  Weight is worth mentioning here because the Mk.II weighed at least 500 lb. more than the Mk. I, which Revs lists at 1,835 lb.

Only 5 GT40 roadsters were built, and only X-1, the Miles and Ruby mount shown below at Sebring, had an aluminum chassis.  At 1,900 pounds, X-1 was lots lighter than the "standard", steel-chassis, 427-powered GT40 Mk. II. Only one other Mk. II car was built with the aluminum chassis by Abbey Panels in England; it disappeared after being sent to Ford for testing.  After its victory at Sebring, X-1 was supposed to be rebuilt by Holman & Moody, but instead Ford allowed it to be destroyed to meet Customs regulations.  Too bad; it would've made a great exhibit at, for example, the Revs Institute.  A Ford GT Mk. IV with US-made chassis won Sebring in '67, and John Wyer's Gulf team of lightweight GT-40 Mk. I Mirages threw cold water on Henry Ford II's "bigger (and heavier) is better" approach by winning Le Mans in '68 and '69, amazingly, both times with the same individual car.  But we digress...

This somehow brings us to the winner of the 1968 Sebring 12 Hours, a Porsche 907K* which happens to sit in the Revs Collier Collection, looking fresh and sleek after a tedious restoration that involved removing a layer of fiberglass added to the car's lightweight (and fragile) form by a former owner who actually wanted to use it as a car.  Possibly not a wise idea, as the 907K's 1,320 pounds were moved by a 2.2 liter flat eight based on Porsche's 1.5 liter, 4-cam Formula 1 engine. The 2.2 liter version made 278 hp at 8,700 rpm, but was complex and temperamental for use in a road car.  When they won the '68 race at an average of 102.5 mph after taking the pole position, though, Jo Siffert and Hans Herrmann didn't seem too worried about any of that...

The 907 seems to have been a bit neglected by history, partly because it had a short career, first racing at the '67 Le Mans and giving way to the 908 during the '68 racing season.  In January of  '68, long-tailed 907s finished 1-2-3 in the Daytona 24 hours; this car is a short-tail; thus 907K.  If you've wondered why the 907 and 908 came after the 911 and 910, the short answer is Peugeot, who protested when Porsche showed off its 901 in fall of '63, claiming to have somehow copyrighted three-digit sequences with center zeroes (203, 403, 404 etc.).  Porsche renamed the 901 the 911, changed the 906 racer to the Carrera 6, and didn't abandon their nervousness about numbers until maybe someone in their legal dept. (if they had one) noticed all those BMWs (502, 503, 507) and Bristols (406 through 409) built without challenge from Peugeot.  So the 907 and 908 showed up out of sequence, years after the 911.

Even though it was the Hoods Off festival at the Revs when our trusty photographer friends visited, the 907's engine lid was down, the better to show off the car's aerodynamic form.  The photo below shows that even with the lid up, you don't get an especially clear picture of the engine.  This has been a problem with Porsches for a while...

The shot below shows the 907 engine from the front; it was time-consuming to construct and to rebuild between races, and for this reason (as well as its 2.2 liter displacement limit) it gave way to the 3 liter flat eight in the 908.  That engine, based upon the design of the production 911 flat six but with 2 more cylinders and 2 more cams, offered the Porsche team more horsepower and a more cost-effective way to go racing.  But that's a story for another day...

*Footnote:  

Briggs Cunningham's race cars and road cars were featured in "A Moment Too Soon: The Cars of Briggs Swift Cunningham", posted April 15, 2017.  For a survey of OSCA history beginning with the founding Maserati brothers, see our posts entitled "The Etceterini Files: When a Maserati is Not a Maserati", posted Dec. 29, 2022, and "Almost Famous" in the archives for April 20, 2016.  We delved into the history of Ford's GT40 in "Roadside Attraction: Shelby American Collection Part 2", posted Dec. 31, 2017, and the brief life of Porsche's 907 in "Paranormal Porsches Part 2: Porsche's Forgotten 907", posted May 11, 2019.

Photo credits: 

All photos were generously provided by Paul Anderson except for the following:

Top:  the author

2nd:  RIch Harman, featured at racingsportscars.com

3rd:  The Revs Institute

7th:  pinterest.com

8th & 9th:  the author

10th:  Ford Motor Company

14th:  Sports Car Market

15th:  Wikimedia Commons