He was a tireless advocate, through his column as well as through a fictional organization he created called Lesser Seattle,[2] for limiting the seemingly unbridled growth and urban renewal that dramatically altered the city's landscape during the second half of the twentieth century.

A catcher on the Quakers baseball team, he played with future major league pitcher Fred Hutchinson,[1] and graduated in 1937.

[3] The newsletter brought him to the attention of an editor at the Seattle Star (a now defunct daily newspaper) where Watson was hired to cover the Rainiers in 1944.

In his column and life in general, Watson was an early champion of civil rights, social reform, and the anti-war movement.

[3] He denounced urban renewal plans aimed at flattening Pioneer Square and radically altering Seattle's Pike Place Public Market.

[9] As was his custom, he continued to skewer the rich and powerful in his columns, always fighting against the kind of development and modernization that he felt was destroying the city he knew and loved.

In November 2000, when his union, The Newspaper Guild, went on strike against The Seattle Times, Watson, then in his eighties, made regular, daily appearances on the picket lines.

The organization expressed Watson's frustration with that of many other Seattle residents with the influx of newcomers to the Puget Sound area from out-of-state.

According to Lesser Seattle and the KBO, immigration of newcomers into the Puget Sound region clogged the roads, spent too much money bidding up prices, did not understand the "NorthWest way of life", and generally made trouble.

Readers and others occasionally observed that it was all a sort of joke; Watson sometimes responded that people could think what they liked, but that he would continue to promote the KBO as one way to deal with the decrease in the quality of life in the Pacific Northwest and especially in Western Washington.

Still in business today, Emmett Watson's Oyster Bar is located in Seattle's Pike Place Market and is currently owned by Sam Bryant's son, Thurman.

He wrote four books (including My Life in Print) and received the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists' Western Washington Chapter in 1998.