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Watt's path from the arid high plains of eastern Wyoming to Washington power was straight and narrow. Rarely are roots so plainly important in shaping values and an outlook. William Watt set up his legal practice in Lusk in 1937; James was born the next year. The Depression was lingering on, but Lusk was lucky: a big oil find 20 miles away created a pocket of prosperity. The influx of oilfield roughnecks made nearby Lance Creek "kind of a freewheeling town," a family friend recalls, and the roustabout carousing might have been a natural source of criminal clients for Attorney Watt. According to the friend, however, "he was so religious that it characterized his business. A lot of people who got in trouble with the law didn't want a lawyer who they thought was a pretty tough cookie himself."
Jim was an exceptionally good boy. He was a Boy Scout (but only a tenderfoot) and always near the top of his class. He was an enthusiastic athlete despite his poor eyesight. He did his chores. "I grew up on a ranch," Watt has said, and he did, after a fashion: for three summers, he shipped out to work on his uncle's 7,000-acre spread. "It was," his father says, "a way to see how the other half lived."
When Jim was twelve, the Watts moved 100 miles to Wheatland (pop. 2,200), a farming town they considered more durably prosperous than Lusk. Their son was the same old Jim. Even on weekend nights, his father remembers, the Wheatland High School valedictorian "would be in there doing his studies while the other boys were out on the town. They used to kid him a lot." When he would join his buddies for a drive, Jim apparently resisted unwholesome peer-group pressure. Says his mother: "If the other kids had beer in the car, he would decide to come home."
Just before his senior year Watt was named Wyoming's "outstanding male high school student"; his female counterpart was another Wheatlander, Leilani Bomgardner. Two years later the pair, both then at the University of Wyoming, were married. Their two children, Eric, 20, and Erin, 22, are today undergraduates at Tulsa's Fundamentalist Oral Roberts University.
Watt's politics, like his ramrod Christian morality, were firmly set before he left home. "You could see the New Deal, the left wing taking over," his father recalls. "We were Republican, rabid Republican."
In college Watt remained diligently on track. He was president of the honor society for three years and an honors graduate. Recalls a fraternity brother: "He was not a hell raiser. He never drank." He still abstains from liquor and coffee.
Watt stayed on in Laramie to get a law degree, went to work for the successful Senate campaign of Conservative Milward Simpson, the current Senator's father, and then to Washington for a four-year stint as Simpson's legislative aide. Says a member of Watt's staff: "It is important to remember that he worked for a western Republican during the formative years of the Great Society. Such people were treated like manure by those in power. Watt hasn't forgotten that." His feelings of resentment, the aide believes account for some of Watt's environmentalist-baiting vigor.