Wattenburg is an avid tennis player. He has played in many celebrity tennis tournaments around the country with his friends from Hollywood. He says that the decision as to where he travels nowadays depends a lot on where the sun is shining and where there is a tennis court. (We had to wait two hours at the Berkeley Tennis Club for the first interview we got with him.)
Access to tennis courts will certainly be an important consideration to him before working in another city. We recommend that guaranteed membership in a first-class tennis club be part of any offer made to him.
In the summertime, he still runs the bulldozers he learned to operate when he worked with his father in the logging woods years ago. He spends two to three weeks average each year fighting forest fires as a bulldozer operator (Catskinner) on the west coast with U.S. Forest Service firefighting crews. A U.S. Forest Service Supervisor in Plumas County, Calif., told us that, “There are not many old pros like him left anymore who can chase a forest fire on a bulldozer in the night over mountains so rugged that you can’t walk on them.” He said, “I mean fire crews won’t go where he takes a bulldozer. This guy attacks a fire just like it was trying to kill his kids. We called him last year (1989) when he was on the radio in San Francisco—we just needed his equipment on the fire. He was on the fire himself four hours later.”
Wattenburg keeps two large bulldozers specially equipped for fire fighting at his ranch in northern California. He mentioned to us that nothing makes him so sad as to see the last of our virgin forests go up in smoke. There was anger in his voice when he told us that a lot of the heavy equipment operators nowadays (he called them hard-hat executives) just sit back and let a fire go until it changes course on its own and burns itself out. “Then they brag about how they bravely stopped this ten-thousand acre fire.” (We found him running a bulldozer when we interviewed him the second time at his ranch in Northern California. He gave one of us, who never learned to drive a car, a lesson on the bulldozer.)