<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "+//ISBN 0-9673008-1-9//DTD OEB 1.0 Document//EN"  "http://openebook.org/dtds/oeb-1.0/oebdoc1.dtd"><html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/x-oeb1-document; charset=utf-8" /><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/x-oeb1-css" href="DrBillBio.css" /><title>Bill Wattenburg’s Background: Hobbies</title></head> <body> <h1>Hobbies</h1> <p>Wattenburg is an avid tennis player. He has played in many celebrity tennis tournamentsaround the country with his friends from Hollywood. He says that the decision as to where hetravels nowadays depends a lot on where the sun is shining and where there is a tennis court. (Wehad to wait two hours at the Berkeley Tennis Club for the first interview we got with him.)</p> <p>Access to tennis courts will certainly be an important consideration to him before working inanother city. We recommend that guaranteed membership in a first-class tennis club be part ofany offer made to him.</p> <p>In the summertime, he still runs the bulldozers he learned to operate when he worked with hisfather in the logging woods years ago. He spends two to three weeks average each year fightingforest fires as a bulldozer operator (Catskinner) on the west coast with U.S. Forest Servicefirefighting 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 nightover mountains so rugged that you can’t walk on them.” He said, “I mean fire crews won’t gowhere he takes a bulldozer. This guy attacks a fire just like it was trying to kill his kids. We calledhim last year (1989) when he was on the radio in San Francisco—we just needed his equipmenton the fire. He was on the fire himself four hours later.”</p> <p>Wattenburg keeps two large bulldozers specially equipped for fire fighting at his ranch innorthern California. He mentioned to us that nothing makes him so sad as to see the last of ourvirgin forests go up in smoke. There was anger in his voice when he told us that a lot of theheavy equipment operators nowadays (he called them hard-hat executives) just sit back and let afire go until it changes course on its own and burns itself out. “Then they brag about how theybravely stopped this ten-thousand acre fire.” (We found him running a bulldozer when weinterviewed him the second time at his ranch in Northern California. He gave one of us, whonever learned to drive a car, a lesson on the bulldozer.)</p> </body></html>