I'm going to take a departure from Alan's memory dump thread and try to go from the beginning. Since I do not have images of many of my watches form the early days I'm going to borrow those where I can find them just to show. The first 15 years of watches goes rather fast given that there were only four. My dad taught me to tell time with a cardboard clock he made during the summer before I started first grade (1968). My birthday is right after school started (September) so one of my presents was a kids Timex. It has a small SS case, white dial with black numbers and hands and a black strap. I believe this is very close to the one I had.



At some point into the seventies thanks to the popularity of the Six Million Dollar man TV show I wanted a digital. Though the character Steve Austin wore a digital Seiko I was given a Texas Instrument similar to this one for Christmas.




Through middle school and high school I had a TI LCD watch.



When I graduated from high school my summer job just before starting college was in a machine shop. When welding something the fields from the welder erased the LCD watch so I went, and sought something else. I learned also to be a bit more cautious with my watch.
The something new was my first diver which was a Pepsi Bezel Pulsar quartz dive watch. I remember it had a plexiglass crystal like many of the divers at the time. Through 4 years of college and USCG Officers Candidate School this watch served me from 1980-sometime in 1985. At that point the crystal and bezel were so scratched they could barely be read. Here is something close to how I remember it. I believe the one I had was on a bracelet. I actually learned to dive the summer between my sophomore and Junior years of college. So this was probably the first watch I ever dived with.


In 1985 I had my first two big watch purchases during my first patrol aboard the USCG WHEC Gallatin. During a port call in San Juan Puerto Rico I purchased a Tag Heuer Quartz Diver that I had up until 2000. At some point during the 90's I had the movement replaced once.


After getting the Tag I noticed being down in the heat of the Caribbean I was getting a sort of burn under my watch. I tried a few others (all quartz) watches, and it continued to happen (and still does today). Even putting something between the case and my skin did not help. Best theory is something in my chemistry is affected by the frequency of the quartz. I can wear quartz for a day, but not much longer if I'm out in the heat. Digital G-Shock and Suunto do not cause this, just ones with the quartz motor. I did find when the internet became available that this is far more common happening with other people. I mention this since one of the things a friend of mine suggested on the ship was to try his Seiko diver Automatic, and he wore the Tag. After two weeks no issues so I was pretty convinced I needed an automatic watch. In the 80's those were not all that common. The second big purchase that year was due to two pilots at the Officers club in GITMO Cuba. They had on these beautiful blue dialed SS and gold diver watches. I started talking to them about them and found out they were automatic mechanical watches. I had seen adds for these Rolex watches in diver magazines, but had never seen one before in the steel. The pilots told me these were on sale at the Navy exchange if you were eligible to buy from the fleet catalog. When I went and checked with the exchange I was a few days shy of the time requirement aboard the ship. I knew we would be back in a week or two for fuel so it was going to be my first stop. The price for a two tone (SS and Yellow gold) blue dial Submariner was $800. This was a about $500 less than an AD at the time. I remember telling my mom who had access to my bank account to pay my bills to pay this charge when it came. She kept asking why I was spending so much money on a watch. After a bit of back and forth she finally agreed to do it and gave me a bit of money towards it since it was coming up on my birthday. I really had no bills back then, and what money I made mostly went in the bank. These were short phone calls from the Navy phone exchange on the base in Cuba. Easier to get things resolved when you only have a few minutes to talk before the next in lines turn. So now I had a collection of two divers. The Rolex kind of became welded on my wrist for almost ten years. The tag got the occasional wear when I was doing law enforcement boardings, but the rest of the time the Sub enjoyed primary wrist time.


While stationed on the ship we had annual training events that had us at GITMO for a month and a half. The first weekend there I was talking to the guys at the Marine exchange which had a killer dive shop about getting my deep water certification. We generally had Sundays off so during this time I got in a great deal of diving. There is a shelf right outside on Guantanamo Bay that falls off for a few miles of depth where the bay is actually shallow and at most maybe 120' of depth. After I got my deep water cert I probably did about 15 tri-mix dives off the bay there over a 4 year period. The bay back then had a pretty large population of hammer head sharks that after a while you sort of got use to them. Don't get me wrong the first time there I kind of freaked out. We went diving at other places there in the Caribbean at most of the islands there.=

As an experiment I tried one of the Tag plastic cased F1 watches in black and yellow that I picked up for under $100 at an exchange. It did not solve the burning issue. I later gave this to my brother to dive with.
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My last watch of the 80's just before I left the Coast Guard I picked up this Seiko alarm watch in St Thomas. It is still running today, and I gave it to a friends son who thought it was cool.
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So standing total going into 1990 when I left the USCG was eight, and my actual collection stood at four. I never realized even back then my leaning towards divers were already in place. Next the 90's which my collecting really picks up speed.