The Watch That Survived The Los Angeles Fires

Kevin Cooley is an artist. He is a photographer, and over the years his work has been exhibited in museums across the globe, featured on the covers of magazines such as New York, and in the pages of The New Yorker (a recent photo of his made the cover of The Hollywood Reporter in a story about the L.A. wildfires). He has documented nature in ways he sees through both the lens of his camera and his own two eyes. Before the wildfires took to Los Angeles last week, you could interpret Cooley’s work anyway you pleased, and you could infer whatever you chose as to why nature, disaster, and particularly fire played such an integral role in his artistry. But then the fires came. The Palisades succumbed to their destructive forces first, and then the flames reached Cooley’s front porch in Altadena. He had come face-to-face with this monster before, but never quite this close. This is a story of how Cooley and his family escaped the Eaton fire, and how a watch inextricably tied to his family survived as well and brought everything full circle.

To really capture this we must begin at the end, and this writer must also insert himself into the narrative. On Jan 16, 2025, a friend of mine sent me a photo taken by photographer and artist Kevin Cooley, 49. The photo shows a yellow-gold Rolex Day-Date – also known as the President – laying atop rubble and ruin in Altadena. In reading the photo’s caption, the story began to unfold. That rubble was the remains of Cooley’s home where he lived with his wife, their 10-year-old son, and their pug, Galaxy. The watch was an heirloom that went back two generations in Cooley’s family.

His grandfather, Dee Westmoreland – born in Texas in 1916 before settling down in Los Angeles – was a corporate lawyer in L.A. representing housing developers. In 1961, when Dee was just 45 years old, he lost his home in the Bel-Air–Brentwood and Santa Ynez fires. At the time, they were the worst in the history of the city. The memory became instilled generationally in Cooley’s family. “My mom, and my uncle to a lesser extent would talk about [it],” Cooley recalled. “It was always delineated between ‘before the fire, and after the fire.’ That was the marker, the milestone.”

About 20 years after the ‘61 fire took his home, corporate attorney Dee Westmoreland walked into a watch boutique in Los Angeles and bought himself a watch that both signifies success and one that has become an absolute emblem of the 1980s as a decade. The Rolex Day-Date in yellow gold is the peak of the mountain. There are often invocations of Gordon Gekko when this watch is referenced, though Gekko never once wore one (that would be the Cartier Santos, for those wondering). But forget fictional corporate sharks. Westmoreland chose the Day-Date as his own.

Unfortunately, he passed away not long after purchasing the watch in 1985. He left it to his son-in-law, Kevin Cooley’s father, Richard Glenn Cooley. “I think I saw my dad wear it, like, I don't know, five or six times,” Cooley said. “ It mostly just sat until 2005, when my parents bought a house that has a walk-in safe. And it just sat in there for the whole time until dad passed away last March.”

When Richard died, he left the mostly unworn Day-Date to Kevin, and Kevin – like his father – put the watch in a safe, a fire safe.

If you asked Cooley today what his job is, sure, he would tell you he’s an artist, but he might first say he’s a fire photographer. “I think about the human relationship to nature. Fire has been a dominant theme since moving to L.A. in 2012 from New York City,” Cooley said.  Although my family is all from here and I've been coming here forever, I'd never really lived here as an adult until then.”

It would seem that Cooley’s familial ties to both the greater Los Angeles area and the wrath of its firestorms were still tight. “I bought a house in 2017, and the La Tuna wildfire had come about a hundred yards away from it,” he remembers. “It was a close call, but it also got me much more interested in photographing more and more fires. So I've been doing it very actively since 2017.”

One of Cooley's past photos of the La Tuna fire of 2017

One of Cooley's past photos from the LA Opera Fire of 2017

When the fire broke out last week and began to take hold on the Palisades, Cooley did what a fire photographer does: he went out and photographed the fire. With almost a decade of experience under his belt, nothing prepared him for what he saw. “The heat of the Palisades fire – out of all my fire experiences  – was just the most insane firefighting battle I've ever seen,” he said. “It just literally felt like a war.”

He recalls that everywhere he looked, things were on fire. He literally drove through flames. “I felt very unsafe,” he recalled. “I have a firefighter’s safety hat and it had blown off and cracked in three places. It was horrific. It really made me think of that movie, Escape from L.A.”

On January 8, while shooting the deteriorating conditions in the Palisades, he received a call from his wife to rush back home for the fire in Altadena, where they lived. For some geographical context, the Pacific Palisades is on the far west side of L.A. while Altadena is further east from where he was shooting. By the time he got home, his wife had emptied their fire safe.

At that time, his house was still there, but he described an undeniable sense of panic in the air. “My kid was screaming…there were dogs…it was just like out of a movie.” He ran up to his wife, herself in a panic, and said “You got the watch, right?” She said yes, and at that point he didn’t even feel the need to examine the safe further. He trusted her.

“It was all so chaotic – even with all my experience being around wildfire already your mind just goes to complete mush,” he said. “But I do remember saying, ‘Alright, I got my dad’s watch.'”

This moment, in my conversation with Cooley caused him to pause for some introspection. “I called it my dad's watch because I got it from my dad, but now as I'm talking more, it was my grandfather's watch, because it really was his, and my dad never really wore it." He continued,  “I guess because, I mean, it's a big flashy gold watch that just so wasn’t his style.” 

It hadn’t been Cooley’s style either. In fact, the very few times he wore the watch since his father’s passing, he did so on what he considers to be a very cheap leather strap, finding the gold president bracelet a touch too flashy. He even asked a boutique if they could help him find a rubber strap for the watch, but he immediately felt the sideways glances and gave up on that notion.

When the safe was emptied, Cooley noticed that the watch was in a “not-so-great” carry-on bag. He took the bag as he, his wife, his son, and Galaxy all piled into the car. They evacuated with a fellow fire photographer to a friend's house a few miles away, only to be awakened at 2 AM and evacuated once more. During this ordeal the watch had been sitting in the bag in the car. At this point they made their way to an AirBnb in Pasadena. It was then that Cooley realized he was walking distance from L.A. Watch Works (co-founded by a good friend of mine, Eric Ku). 

Cooley took the watch inside intent on taking off the strap he put it on, and getting the original gold bracelet re-installed. While he was at the counter, the store employee showed him a watch that hadn’t been saved, a Rolex that had perished in the fire, one that had been in a fire safe too. “ it didn't even occur to me that a fire safe wouldn't survive,” he said.

But Cooley was intent on getting his watch back into its intended state with case and bracelet attached. “I needed to have them together,” he said. “ I don't have a place to live. So I felt that the safest place was on my wrist. I really believed that.” 

He went on to say, “I'd been bouncing around different places in someone's friend's dad's house, and an Airbnb. Just the thought of leaving it somewhere was unthinkable, of leaving my grandfather’s watch, my dad’s watch.”  

Putting the watch back on the bracelet, and getting it on his wrist made Cooley rethink his feelings toward the watch and how he (and likely his father) had seen it in the past. “I was trying to find a way to make something that wasn't me.., me,” he said. “But now, especially after this fire, it's like, ‘No, the watch is the watch,’ and it certainly represents my grandfather's era.”

Photo of Cooley's home engulfed in flames as shot by Cooley

Photo of Cooley's home after the fire, as shot by Cooley

This was on January 13th. On January 14th, Cooley returned to Altadena, to attempt to return home. They were not, however, allowing the public to return just yet. As a fire photographer, though, Cooley had press credentials. Understanding the scale of the Eaton fire, he was not optimistic what he would be returning to. And what he found was that his house had been entirely lost to the fire, reduced to its foundation. 

Devastated, Cooley began trying to make sense of where things were in the home. “I walked around in the rubble. All that's left of the house is raised foundation,” he said. “I was trying to piece together where the safe was and there was no evidence of there being a safe.” Just as he had heard in L.A. Watch Works, his fire safe had perished in the flames. But he found what he thought was the spot where the safe was.

He looked down at his wrist, took the gold Day-Date off and placed it upon the ruins of his family’s home, in the spot where that watch once sat. He then began taking photos of it, beautiful photos of a watch that once belonged to a man who lost his home in a wildfire, that now belongs to the grandson of that man who lost his home in a wildfire. The watch endures, a token and a totem of a shared family history. 

At the end of our conversation, I asked Kevin if he had any other memories of the watch. He fondly remembered his dad wearing it to his wedding. And one day he will give it to his son.

“It reminds me of my dad, but also connects me to this man I never really knew,” Cooley said. “I knew he lost his home and how much of a mess he was in the following years.”

The fire took a toll on his grandfather, and it has ravaged the home he has made with his own family since 2020. But somehow, this horrific chapter in his life brought him back to this watch. And where it once sat in a fire safe that was eventually burned by Eaton, it now resides in the safest place it can be.

“I certainly feel its presence on my wrist,” he said. “It's a lot for me.”