From a well-known scientist who once worked with Wattenburg:
If anyone has spent $10 or $20 million on a difficult technical problem and not found a solution, they probably should have asked Bill Wattenburg First.
Said to Bill by a woman who pulled up next to his Mercedes 280SL in traffic (his licence plate read “PILL”):
Hey, thanks for reminding me!—SF Chronicle, Aug. 16, 1974, p. 25, in Herb Caen’s column.
From a colleague at the Nevada nuclear weapons test site:
He was always looking for the simple solution that everyone else had overlooked. His favorite saying was:A smart cowboy just wouldn’t work this hard to make things so goddamn difficult.Then he would throw up his hands and go off to tease the ladies in some local bar down the highway while the rest of us were working our butts off.
You are always wondering when he is going to make a fool out of you, and do it in some simple way or with some crazy experiment that forces you to stand and applaud your own ignorance.
But if you want to know what I really think of him, I’ll tell you. If I am ever trapped in a spaceship and everyone says it is hopeless, I hope he is still around, and near a telephone…
From a U.S. Forest Service Supervisor in Plumas County, Calif.:
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. 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 once 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.