The Priceless Watch: 1967 Tissot Seastar

There are watches that affect people on a level that has nothing to do with pedigree or price tag. No matter how big or impressive a collection gets, there is likely to be a watch that stays in it. For me, one of those watches is this vintage (ca. 1967) Tissot Seastar dress watch. Why is that? It’s not a particularly expensive watch, or a rare one, or a very complicated one. It’s certainly not a very tough watch, and I don’t even wear it often. While it doesn’t have a ton of collector’s value, it is priceless to me for a simple reason: Father’s Day.

First, a little background on the watch itself. The Seastar is a venerable line from Tissot, though most associate it with its modern incarnation as a hefty, capable dive watch. That wasn’t always the case, and the Seastar has gone through many incarnations as a dress watch and even a chronograph.

This particular Seastar is reference 44541-1X, with the Tissot caliber 784-2. At 34 mm it’s considerably smaller than most of my modern watches, but in the era in which it was made, it would have been fairly typical for a man’s watch. The steel case is basic, a good traditional dress watch with slim, elegant lugs, and a coin-edged crown capped with the Tissot logo. The acrylic box crystal adds quite a bit of height to the watch (and is mightily scratched from its years of service, I might add), but it’s still nice and compact and great as a dress watch. I’ve tried to blend its dressy and sporty heritage by putting it on a brown leather rally strap from Rios1931 that I think gives it a sassy, old-school vibe.

The dial is the real highlight of this watch, and doesn’t look dated in the least, its design a clean expression of timeless design cues. The blue sunburst dial looks fantastic even after all these years despite some light spotting from age, complemented nicely by the simple baton handset and applied bar hour markers. The hands have lost bits of their lume over the years, and the tritium itself (yes, this is a T Swiss dial with tritium!) no longer glows. There’s a framed date window at 3 o’clock, and while I’m never going to be a big fan of date windows, this one is nicely designed and implemented.

There is a surprising amount of dial text split across six lines, and it might have felt a bit crowded but it’s nicely proportioned and smartly laid out. In fact, the applied elements are my personal favorite part of this watch: the Tissot “T” logo as well as the brand’s name at the top of the dial, and the Seastar name and logo beneath. They are rendered in a dark, almost graphite gray that appears silver under direct light and black in other conditions. The Seastar “sunburst” logo itself is a significant part of the attraction for me, as it’s not present on many Seastars after the mid-60s that I could find. I’m not sure why Tissot discontinued its use, but I would speculate that it would be the incremental cost of a redundant element (or maybe they, too, realized the dial was a bit cluttered)

So why am I so enamored with this particular watch, out of all the ones I own? For one thing, it’s the first vintage piece I purchased when I really went down the watch collecting rabbit hole. Something about the heritage of the Tissot brand itself, coupled with the whimsical spirit of the Seastar itself really spoke to me. I also learned a valuable (and expensive) lesson in vintage watch collecting: I was so excited upon receiving it that I overwound it while trying to cycle it to the right date. It spent the first few months of my ownership in the hands of a local watch repair shop who luckily took very good care of it. Beyond that, it works beautifully as a modern piece, clearly old without stylistically being too much of a throwback. Finally, and most importantly, it’s the watch that my wife had engraved for me on my first Father’s day: the caseback adorned with the names and birthdate of our twin daughters.

I haven’t been a dad for very long, but it has been a transformative experience, with epiphany after epiphany. Having never really given much thought to parenthood prior to meeting my wife, I honestly worried that I would resent it, that I would resist the loss of free time and the seismic shift in my priorities. I read enough horror stories that I even feared I wouldn’t like the babies when they were born. I am lucky in that I formed an instant, powerful bond with each of the little ladybugs as soon as I laid eyes on them. And while I can’t pretend I don’t wish I had a little more time to relax or could just hop in the car and go on an adventure without the incredible logistics of packing everything two toddlers might need, I love every messy second I spend with them.

I have a great relationship with my parents, and I’m grateful not just for the lessons they taught me and the examples they set, but the friendship we share. Interestingly, I didn’t get my love of watches from either of them. In fact, they both purport not to have been into watches despite holding onto just about every watch they’ve ever owned regardless of whether they work, so figure that one out. Even if they didn’t explicitly set out to teach me about watches, both of them have always worn a watch, and I’ve come to associate them each with a certain style (gold dress watches on mesh bracelets for my pop, stainless on silver bangles in my mother’s case). As a kid, I tended toward more “serious” watches in an effort to emulate them (see my review of my first “real” watch, a Seiko Kinetic).

Here we veer into cliche territory, wherein I confront my mortality and the passage of time as I become a father. I also have to confront my love of buying shiny things and the cavalier attitude I used to have toward their acquisition. I got the Tissot in the early days of my wife’s pregnancy (before promptly breaking it) and it became almost the incarnation of my anxiety and excitement. I will forever associate this watch with my journey into fatherhood, and my wife getting it engraved with the girls’ names and birthday turned it from a treasured possession into a priceless heirloom. I hope that maybe someday one of them will want to wear it, and some of that meaning, some of that emotion, will echo down the years to them.