Rear Admiral Anthony Watson: from 'the projects' to the Pentagon

Ebony, June, 1994 by Hans J. Massaquoi

YOU can take Anthony Watson out of Cabrini-Green, but you can't take Cabrini-Green out of Anthony Watson.

Throughout his incredible transformation from "project kid" in one of Chicago's reputedly most dangerous public housing developments to U.S. Naval Academy midshipman, to nuclear attack submarine squadron commander, to rear admiral in one of the Pentagon's most arcane inner sanctums, Watson has tenaciously clung to his roots and remained a highly visible role model in his former neighborhood.

Two years ago, that neighborhood made national headlines following the sniper killing of seven-year-old Dantrell Davis as his mother walked him to Cabrini-Green's Edward Jenner Elementary School, the same school Adm. Watson attended when he was a boy. The unremitting horrors of violence and drugs that are engulfing the public housing community notwithstanding, the admiral has been unshakeable in his conviction that most of Cabrini-Green's residents are decent, law-abiding people and that their children can be saved and directed toward fulfilling and productive lives. All it takes, he maintains, is people who care enough to invest some of their time and energy "to inspire the children by helping them to create a vision of what they want to be."

Toward that end, the admiral has enlisted the help of other Jenner School graduates who, like himself, have managed to beat the Cabrini-Green rap and "made it" in mainstream society. Last March, his efforts culminated in a unique, two-day Jenner School "homecoming" during which some 30 male and female Jenner alumni -- including a doctor, a lawyer, a minister; a bank president, a social worker and an Army officer-gathered for the sole purpose of impressing on the children, "We made it, and so can you!" During the ceremonies and workshops, participants pledged to work on an ongoing basis as mentors to help motivate the students to set goals for success through education and hard work.

The dynamo behind this ambitious effort, Adm. Watson, is a strapping, 6-foot-2 1/2, 225-pound gentle giant whose kindly, soft-spoken demeanor around children belies his tough training as a leader in nuclear underwater naval warfare. He is convinced that his own success did not happen in spite of his Cabrini-Green background but because of it, a message he repeats like a mantra when he tells Cabrini-Green children that they, too, can be successful because they learned to survive in an environment more challenging than those most children face. Looking back on his own childhood, he mostly credits his father, Johnny Watson, a printing plant worker who died in 1983 at age 64, and his mother; 70-year-old Virginia Watson, who raised him and I his two older brothers and three younger sisters, for steering them in the light direction against seemingly insurmountable odds. Mrs. Watson, who for the last 24 years has been a school community representative at Jenner School, and who still lives in the same, tiny Cabrini-Green row house the admiral and his siblings used to call home, returns the compliment. "You can only lead them [children] to the fork in the road and they have to choose the right way," she says modestly, yet with unconcealed pride in her children's achievements. In addition to the admiral, there are Charles, 46, an accountant; Barbara, 40, a bank supervisor; Diane, 34, a credit union account supervisor; and Liz, 30, an electrical engineer. Another son, George, a PR man, died in 1992 at age 43.

While growing up at Cabrini-Green, there was nothing that suggested to Adm. Watson that one day he would be an officer and a gentleman, not to mention a distinguished member of the Navy's elite corps of admirals. His memories include being robbed at knifepoint in an elevator, and standing on the intersection of Oak and Cleveland as a patrol boy captain, afraid every day to be beaten up because he hadn't paid his "protection dues" to the neighborhood toughs.

Following his 1966 graduation from Chicago's Lane Tech High School, at the time an all-boys school where he had been a football star; young Watson put in a brief stint at the local University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus, where his scholastic performance turned out to be nothing to write home about. "It was depressing for me to start college that way," he recalls. "I thought college would be a different environment, but for me the only difference was taking the No. 37 bus going south instead of taking the No. 40 bus going north. He says that as a result he ended up cutting a lot of classes, playing a lot of pool and not paying a lot of attention to his studies.

Since tuition for an out-of-town college was out of his reach, he jumped at the chance to try out for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., when he was recruited as a prospective football player: He says he had no confidence that he would be accepted because he was No. 3 on the list of candidates. As it turned out, the No. 1 candidate had a physical problem and the No. 2 candidate flunked his entrance exam, leaving him as the sole surviving candidate.