The following transcript was dictated from audio recording made of the memorial service for James Rose Watson and Charles Gray Watson on January 16, 2000. An audio recording of this memorial is available.
I first met Chuck in June 1966 when we moved next door in Brookline, Massachusetts. We had rented the apartment sight unseen after hearing about it from the Watsons through the Randolphs, dear mutual friends.
My wife Helen and I were a little anxious. All we knew about these Watson people was that when Helen Randolph had been ill in Cleveland a couple of years ago where Chuck and Peter were fellow house officers, the Watsons had arrived at the hospital with a picnic including not only sandwiches and drinks but also ants. What's a picnic without ants? We weren't quite sure what kind of apartment this was going to be.
It was fine. Chuck and Nancy were our personal introduction to the Brookline social community and the Boston medical community. Gray Watson was 10 months old when our Holly Gates was born in August. It was a literal godsend to have Chuck and Nancy next door. Before long we had an intercom wire between the houses, with transceivers next to each child's crib. We did reciprocal babysitting. When we were both out, one baby sitter sat for both. We were a little shy on cash in those days.
It took Chuck to notice one day that the wire was broken. We realized that it had been that way for almost a month. During that month those kids had been as good as gold -- didn't hear a peep.
We got to know each other even better. I got in trouble with Watson when I gave Helen a black nightgown for Christmas and Nancy heard about it. He paid me back by being unmerciful when I tried to recycle a little wet kitty litter by heating it in the oven.
He was always washing his Volkswagen beetle. He said he liked a clean car. I knew better. He always wanted his VW to look better than mine.
The Watson's were always up to something. They collected antiques, they watched birds, they loved to garden. There was an extraordinary energy, and enthusiasm, and generosity.
We were very sad in 1968 when Chuck finished his surgical residency and they moved to Pittsburgh. It was an enormous loss for us. By then Andrew and our Sarah had been born and each mother was godmother to the other's child. We also met Chuck's father for the only time in the spring of 1968 when Andrew was christened. I remember him as a lovely man and obviously a classy man. They stayed at the Ritz. As well they took us out to dinner at Locke Ober's, one of Boston's most expensive and historic restaurants.
It was also in 1968 when Chuck had a recurrence of his Hodgkins disease which was first diagnosed and treated when he was at medical school. A surgical nurse who scrubbed with him in those days recalls the Chuck politely (Chuck was always polite) excused himself from the operating room as if he had to go to the bathroom. Everyone knew that he was going downstairs for another life saving but body debilitating dose of radiation therapy. He would soon return, as if he had been to the bathroom, and finish the operation. Sally Hurlbut reports that she and other assistants were "awe struck by this man's courage."
Both the Watsons and Randolphs spent time each summer in Wareham, Mass. near Cape Cod. This continued after they went to Pittsburgh. They would invite us there for tennis, swimming, small boat sailing, visiting, and carousing. Holly remembers their yellow house. In the evenings she and Gray were upstairs supposedly sleeping but of course "jibber jabber jibber jabber" while down stairs their parents were, as she said, "whooping it up." Holly describes Wareham with the Watson's as "fun central."
"You guys were different around the Watsons," she told me the other day. "You weren't so worried Dad and Mom mellowed out. You had fun and we had fun."
Holly recollects, "They were the jazzy people. At those wonderful Randolph parties they were the ones who would each put a leg in a potato sack and race against the kids. They were the ones who would put on all those crazy clothes and run across the lawn and take them off for the next pair in those relay races. I never saw you guys do that."
Chuck was scornful when I mixed up my own sun screen solution. One day he spied a rusty oil drum on the beach. That night he and Randolph presented me with this terrible looking 55 gallon oil drum to be used as a container for my 16 ounces of home made sun screen.
Since then that drum, and its successor, have traveled a lot of miles for surreptitious deliveries. One day Helen and I found it tucked gently under the covers of our double bed. Watson's anonymous note hoped that it "might drum something up."
There had to be a successor to the drum after the Watson kids filled the original with cement and left it on Randolph's lawn. The successor arrived via Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh for my 40th birthday. I have the honor, by the way, of being born on Timmy's birthday.
On Randolph's 50th birthday Chuck and I were wondering what a balding 50 year old guy would most need in a drum. We needed to label it properly. I considered Myers Rum, or perhaps Mount Gay. "No" says Watson. "He needs 55 gallons of testosterone." Testosterone it was.
In the early 70s we four chartered a sailboat for a week of cruising in the Virgin Islands. It was in my name, but of course Watson wanted to be the skipper every other day. I remember sweating bullets one day when he took us safely through a very narrow passage we had no business attempting. We were a bit surprised at the end of that wonderful week to discover only 2 bottles remaining from that case of rum.
Chuck and Nancy rapidly graduated from Sunfish and Tech Dinghy to a 12 foot Herrishoff. This was a beautifully finished wooden sailboat called Highboy, after one of their special antiques. He treated it like a floating grand piano. He is the only guy I've ever known who used furniture polish on his sailboat's brightwork. He wasn't happy one day when he found that some jerk had put an oil drum in there.
Randolph reminded me of how Chuck taught Gray and Andrew to sail when they were young children. They didn't just have to call the front and the back the bow and the stern and left and right, port and starboard. They had to call that compartment in the stern where you put stuff the Lazarette. He wanted them to have it right, and get it right they did.
They began sailing big time and this was a family operation from the start. They chartered in the Bahamas over spring vacation, in the Caribbean, and later they sailed the waters of western Scotland.
By this time they had a cruising sailboat boat of their own. Watson made the ultimate sacrifice and moved from wood to fiberglass. They later upgraded to their current boat Odyssey. It is an appropriate name not only for the boat but for his whole career.
What was extraordinary to us was how the operation worked. Andrew was the mechanic. He would take off a cylinder head, blow out fuel lines, replaced starters -- did whatever was necessary. Gray was the electrical guy. Boats' electrical systems and salt water add up to corrosion. He rewired much of the boat, knew the whole complex electrical and electronic configuration. Those kids knew and know that boat inside and out.
While Chuck was the skipper, life on that boat was hardly like life in his operating room. Peter Randolph who sailed with them a great deal says that when Nancy or the kids disagreed with something Chuck was doing, they let him know in no uncertain terms. Peter heard language out of Nancy that literally would "make a sailor blush." One wonderful result of this sailing is that they loved to cruise the coast of Maine where we spend summers. We have seen more of them there in recent years. It makes my house look great to have that boat moored out front.
During one of their Maine visits our son John was having a beer party in our boathouse. "Chris" asked Watson in that quiet Watsonesque way with a twinkle in his eye, knowing the answer to the question he was asking. "Do you any cherry bombs?" Down he and I went directly under the floor of the boathouse and lighted one off. That was a very surprised boathouse full of kids!
There you have it. Ants, intercoms, nightgown, dishwasher, kitty-litter, oil drum, sailboats, Mount Gay, cherry bomb. Add it all up and you get 32 years of great fun.
I believe in the folk wisdom that when life gives you lemons you should make lemonade. Chuck dealt with lemons for the last 40 years. Every day he was living with Hodgkins disease and its treatment consequences. He made extraordinary lemonade. The major ingredient, of course, was courage.
How he did it, I don't know but he was always fun to be with. Chuck, I will never forget you, but I will miss you terribly. I will miss you terribly.