Unsung Heroes: Craig Watness from the Seattle Pipe Club
-
Kevin Godbee - Apr 17, 2018
- 5 min read
A. Miller
Our community is a unique one. And this month I had the opportunity to speak with a man who for 31 years has been passionate about working with the Special Olympics as a coach. For the unfamiliar, the Special Olympics is the world’s largest sports organization for people with intellectual disabilities.
Craig Watness, our focus for this month’s article, told me, “I would give up everything if I could fight for the rights and dignity of those with developmental disabilities. I started out in 1986 as a track and field coach. Three years later circumstances said I needed to be a soccer coach, and since 1989 I’ve been head soccer coach. I’ve coached soccer, basketball, t-ball, flag football, volleyball, roller skating—I’m 6 foot and 190 pounds and I’m a roller skating coach.”
I can’t think of a better place to start than this. Craig told me his wife passed away in 1996 rather suddenly and it was the Special Olympics community that wrapped their arms around him, “They lifted me up, pulled me through, and reminded me everything is going to be fine.”
Born and raised in Lakewood, Washington and having lived nowhere outside of the state. He worked as a waiter in the restaurant industry and then worked for 2.5 years for Cascade Airways. While there he said FedEx would come to the counter and pick up packages and ask, “When are you going to get a real job?” So, in April of 1981 Craig started full time with FedEx, “In one week of work at FedEx, I made more than I made full time in two weeks at Cascade Airways,” Craig told me. This April he’ll have been at FedEx for 37 years as a delivery driver.
As a FedEx driver Craig would run across families he knew from the Special Olympics, delivering packages to houses of an athlete here and there, “My community in Seattle comes from both the pipe community and this Special Olympics community.”
Two pretty fantastic places to find community if you ask me. So, to pivot a little more towards latter, Craig told me, “My grandfather smoked a pipe, my father smoked a pipe, both of them very infrequently. I had been an on and off pipe smoker at 19, 20, 21 around there. I was also a cigarette smoker.” Then around 1999 while playing around with pipes and not smoking them much, his wife picked up a Pipes and Tobacco Magazine at the store and said, “Do you know the Seattle Pipe club is meeting tonight, why don’t you go?”
There Craig ran in to an old friend and former next-door neighbor Tom Wolfe and they ended up in a slow smoke competition. Craig laughs that he lost that in a mere 22 minutes because he was talking and not really paying attention in his first slow smoke. He had another competition in ’02 where he didn’t place in the top 10, and then ’03 the United Pipe Clubs of America started and there were international rules set for slow smoking. That year he set the North American record at 1 hour, 55 minutes, and 12 seconds. A record which stands today.
Craig is many things. But slow smoking champion is definitely one them. Eight-time slow smoking champion, but still the holder of the North American record.
Craig Watness at the 2014 Chicago Pipe Show. Photo: Fred Brown
“I had no winning formula, it was the luck of the draw. And I think I was a little more studious on tamping it down, the two other people going over an hour and 30 minutes is what pushed me along. I don’t remember the tobacco, but it was good.” If you’re like me, this immediately leads to questions about his lifestyle and how much time he spends practicing slow smoking tobacco with an intentionality that might otherwise take away from the joys of the calm. But Craig was quick to put such thoughts to rest for me.
“I do not practice smoking a pipe. I enjoy the taste of tobacco. I enjoy the stuff you have to do to get a pipe going correctly. When I go in to a competition, I have not practiced but I have tried the tobacco. I get in to a zen-like thought process. Slow my breathing down. I don’t talk to people, because that will take away competition. And a lot of people are out to get me, and I want them to beat me. To me it’s just plain fun. It’s not a competition, it’s not stressful, it’s not a battle. Slow the heart rate, slow the breathing, enjoy the moment…”
And now I want to sit across from Craig and watch his unpracticed methodology.
In regular life Craig says he likes basically anything Joe Langford (the blender of the Seattle Pipe Club tobaccos) blends, Virginias and Periques, he doesn’t particularly care for Latakia, however the are some blends with it where he is a fan. These days he’s been sticking with River Rush. A few years ago, all he bought was bulldogs from just about anybody, Castello, Savinelli etc… these days he’s been smoking big pipes with big deep bowls. “I had one commissioned by Steve Liskey, absolutely fabulous big smoking pipe, and another one from a fellow pipe club member, Robert Amundson—he’s a full-time dad and he’s put together a deep bowl with a big draft hole.” He told me he finds a joy in the flavor of the middle of the pipe that lasts longer when using a bigger pipe.
Craig has been around and involved in the Seattle Pipe Club for long enough now that his stories go on longer than I have room for in this column, including the time he was gifted a $1,500 S. Bang stack billiard from an old retired English Professor. Being the slow-smoke champion is heroism enough, but building community at one of the most renown pipe clubs and volunteering for the Special Olympics, all while sharing his generous attitude pushes Craig right to the top.
I’ll leave you with a few words Matt Guss (an unofficial leader at the Seattle Pipe Club) gave me about Craig: “One of the original members from 2001, Craig is one of the most dependable stalwarts of the Club. Super generous of spirit and an absolute fixture — an amazing guy with broad shoulders ready to help in any way needed. Craig is our Club Slow Smoke Champion this year and 7 other times! He holds the US National Slow Smoke record and competes in Chicago every year. Plus, he has the best mustache of anyone in the club.”
You don’t have to have the best mustache to appear in this column, but it doesn’t hurt.
Opening Photo Credit: Fajka.org
Written by Kevin Godbee
5 Responses
Recent Posts
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! Or perhaps it is that sense of satisfaction knowing and appreciating you made it to another day. With the world in a kind of rinse-and-repeat history, reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, it is perhaps a good moment to remember some of Pipedom’s philosophers whose cogent thoughts brought light to clear a path in the mists of confusion and confounding opinions. Ok. No gloom and doom. Just some down-home thoughts. Think of times in the past when history was running off the rails. It took our pipe-smoking thinkers (the mind workers of the world) to speak of better pathways to more light. Think for a moment, with a pipe in hand, these wizards of the world and word: Albert Einstein, J. R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edwin Hubble, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, and Jean-Paul Sartre. All learned and enlightened. They offered wisdom instead of storms of meaningless roads to nowhere. All while smoking their pipes! Maybe especially with the help of their pipes in the art of thinking and philosophy. Recall the words of Mr. E=MC2 when he said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” Amen and amen! Dealing with world-rattling events takes a calm and objective view of things, to the Pundit’s way of summing it up. You just don’t go messing around with quantum physics without a calm and objective approach, methinks. Or as the extraordinary physicist Robert Oppenheimer said after he and a team in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Labs developed a way to split atoms into bombs during World War II. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer referring to the development of the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It must be pointed out that Oppenheimer was more of a cigarette smoker than a pipe smoker. Nonetheless, pipes were part of his personality. Now, if you have read some of the great authors of the past and present, their pipes were always nearby. Reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a three-pipe problem at times. S. Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre require time with your pipes to reflect on the existential problems and solutions these authors provide in learned novels and other narratives. Or take Edwin Hubble and Bertrand Russell, philosophers of another world. Pipes are required for reading. The quantum lode of ideas Pundit is attempting to sort out is that our pipes are relaxing and stimulate our thoughts and creativity. Especially in these last months of the year. Many times Pundit has had that light bulb flick on while smoking my beloved pipes. And friends in Pipedom, it ain’t easy to turn on the lights in Pundit’s rock pit head. Now it’s time for a quote from a Pipe Smoker of the Past. Shelby Foote was born Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., and died June 27, 2005, in Memphis, Tenn. A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
A guy who likes any SPC blend in a big bowl is alright with me.
Way to go Craig, and thanks for the comment about your favorite blender. My head was already big enough.
Great article. Love to hear the stories of those that have been around a long time. Thanks for sharing
Met Craig at this month’s meeting and he was awesome. Lots of knowledge and lots of fun.
Great article, great Man!