Does anyone ever forget their first Baselworld? Mine was 39 years ago, and I remember much of it as if it were last week. In preparing to go to Basel again this year, it is impossible for me not to recall with wonder the way the Swiss watch world was when I experienced it for the first time.
Hayek Sr. It was a time when the watch world was at war and the Swiss were losing, with the old Swiss watch order suffering a painful death and the new one a painful birth. It was my job to cover all that. I had been assigned the watch beat on America's top jewelry-industry trade magazine about 18 months before I arrived at the Basel Fair, as it was then called, on Monday, April 23, I was raring to go.
But, to my horror, I was immediately railroaded out of town and did not get back to the fair until three days later due to an unexpected, but not uneventful, detour via Bern, Bienne, and France. When I presented myself at the fair's press center on Monday morning, there clearly was a problem.
I was taken to see a tall, distinguished, gray-haired gentleman named Henri Schaeren, who was a Basel Fair bigwig. But I wasn't. The fair in those days had a formal program for overseas journalists. The program had started on Saturday or Sunday I never found out which. That day the group was in Bern, Switzerland's capital. And I was supposed to be with them. All of this was news to me and made absolutely no sense.
Poor Schaeren had a terrible time convincing this lone stray from the press pack that while the fair was here, I should be there. My presence was expected.
