Victorinox Swiss Army: Watches Part 2

The year is 1997.  

After three years of wearing my Wenger Swiss Army watch that my father bought me for my high school graduation, the leather strap broke.  That happens.  What I should have done was just find another band and kept wearing the watch.  But instead I just stuck it in a drawer.  Maybe I mentioned to someone that my watch had broken as opposed to saying that the strap had broken.

Anyway, I received a new watch for my birthday from my mother.  And, surprise surprise, it was another Swiss Army watch.  I wore it for the next couple of years in college until, you guessed it, the leather strap broke.  Haha!  Nowadays I get me a new strap pronto so that I can at least keep the watch in rotation.

My father would buy me my first Casio G-Shock watch at the Final Four in San Antonio when I found this really cool navy one.  It had a neat luminous display.  Alas, that G-Shock and the red one I bought after it died are no more.  But I still have my Victorinox Swiss Army.

I was wearing my red Casio G-Shock when I started teaching high school English in 2002.  That first year teaching I befriended another teacher.  He was ultra smart and knew everything about teaching, English, and…watches.

Douglas Everhart was quite the renaissance man.  We quickly became friends.  I learned how to teach by observing his classrooms.  Then we started hanging out outside of school.

Douglas owned an entire building in downtown Lexington, North Carolina.  It was the tallest building in town.  Originally, he had taught ballet in this building.  Yes!  Ballet!  Hold up!  Let me give you a super quick summary about Douglas.  After college, Douglas had studied acting at Yale.  I think he studied dance there too.  After getting his Masters degree at Yale, he moved to France where he continued to dance ballet.  He toured Europe and there’s even a rumor that he was secretly in the French Foreign Legion.  He never opened up about that to me.  Anyway, Douglas moved back to Lexington in the early 1980s and started one of the first ballet companies in the area at a time when ballet was just getting big.  I think it was right before the movie Flashdance came out.  Douglas continued teaching ballet for years until ballet kinda dried up.  Then he started teaching high school drama, English, and French.

Douglas always dressed superb.  He looked like a model prepared to walk out on the runway.  For the longest time he had long white hair that he pulled back in a ponytail.  Years later he cut it into a spike and gelled it straight up.  He always had a striking look to him.

And then there were his cars.  Douglas had multiple Porsches, a black M5 BMW, and an old white IROC-Z Camaro in his collection.  He had it all.

Douglas lived on the third floor of his building.  It was so cool because we would walk out on top of it and gaze down upon the town at night.

And then there was his watch collection.  Until this day, I have never seen such a vast watch collection.  He had one of everything.  His favorite thing was finding the right band for the right watch.  He would often buy a watch just for the band and then immediately pop that band off to put it on another watch.

One day while we were teaching he asked me why I wore my red Casio G-Shock.  When I told him that I wore it because my other watch bands had broken, he told me to bring him the watch.  He took one look at it and said that he had just the band for it.

So, what you see here is my 1997 Victorinox Swiss Army Officers Ratchet Bezel Watch with a black rubber band courtesy of Douglas Everhart.

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Victorinox Swiss Army Officers Ratchet Bezel Watch