For a long while, Marathon was one of those "if you know, you know" watch brands. Founded in 1939, the Canadian company started supplying timepieces to the Allied Forces in 1941. It's been making tool watches with the accuracy and overall toughness to hold their own in the most rigorous conditions ever since. Need proof of its bona fides? Marathon is currently the sole supplier of watches to the U.S. Armed Forces. That's a coup for the health of the business, no doubt. But it's also, in all likelihood, a big part of the reason some watch fans aren't yet familiar with the name. Why bother courting new customers when you've got a government contract, right? Well, maybe not. Because over the last few years, Marathon has been branching out with new means of distribution. In addition to its own site, the brand now sells at lifestyle-y retailers like Huckberry and J.Crew.
For a long while, Marathon was one of those "if you know, you know" watch brands. Founded in 1939, the Canadian company started supplying timepieces to the Allied Forces in 1941. It's been making tool watches with the accuracy and overall toughness to hold their own in the most rigorous conditions ever since. Need proof of its bona fides? Marathon is currently the sole supplier of watches to the U.S. Armed Forces. That's a coup for the health of the business, no doubt. But it's also, in all likelihood, a big part of the reason some watch fans aren't yet familiar with the name. Why bother courting new customers when you've got a government contract, right? Well, maybe not. Because over the last few years, Marathon has been branching out with new means of distribution. In addition to its own site, the brand now sells at lifestyle-y retailers like Huckberry and J.Crew. A week out from his hitting Chris Rock, 'Bad Boys 4' and 'Fast and Loose' have reportedly stalled. Get off the flat-front merry-go-round and breathe a little easier, man. "He's still trying to skateboard?" asked a friend of Tony Hawk's then-wife, Cindy, in the early 1990s. "Are you serious? Grow up. Get a job." By then, Cindy's gig as a manicurist made her the breadwinner for the household. It was an astounding state of affairs because Tony Hawk had already been to the mountaintop—a skating phenom, the boy wonder-turned-technical master, a winning machine at competitions across his native California and beyond. "What's it going to take to win?" a rival said ahead of one event back then. "You're going to have to beat Tony Hawk." And then the bottom fell out of the skateboarding business, and he went from world tours through Europe and Japan to selling his house and doing odd jobs for cash. On the Long Island Inferno, two fathers, both with complicated pasts, took it all too far. Neither man was ever the same. For the sci-fi luminary, what looks the same in her 2401 is more important than the inner workings of any time machine. I am a longtime Ken Burns fan. Before the pandemic set in, I had already seen many of his films. But there were some big ones that I managed to miss. So, to cheer myself up, I committed to watching the rest of them during quarantine, starting with The Vietnam War. As I made my way through the films, my sadness receded. Relaxing into the sweet, predictable pacing of a Ken Burns docuseries eased my mind, and the history presented within the films put the current moment into perspective. Now, I'm now uniquely qualified—in so much as anyone is—to rank the efforts of the legendary documentarian. |
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