Former Hercules Councilman Dewey "D.T." Watson has died following a four-year struggle from the effects of a brain hemorrhage.

Watson suffered an intracranial hemorrhage a day after he had otherwise successful back surgery in November 2000 and never quite recovered. Watson went on dialysis in 2003 after his kidneys failed. His right side was virtually paralyzed after a stroke in January and he had frequent bouts of pneumonia, the last one fatal, according to friends and family.

Watson died Friday at Doctors Medical Center San Pablo. He was 61.

"When this thing got him a few years ago, it was a shock. He never got over it," said Watson's friend, former Hercules mayor John Cadigan.

"He was a fighter, God bless his heart," Cadigan said. "This is hard to say, but I know he's in a better place."

The back surgery in 2000 was Watson's sixth since he broke his back in 1975 while working as a welder in Southern California, said his wife of 27 years, Shireen Watson.

"He was plagued with that for the rest of his life," she said.

A native of Georgia, D.T. Watson came to California as a teenager and finished high school in Oakland.

He served in the Navy from 1960 to 1964. Assigned to the battleship U.S.S. Ranger, he spent time in Vietnam, Japan and Hawaii.

After leaving the Navy, Watson became an independent truck driver, traveling between the West and East coasts, his wife said. He became a welder after starting a family.

From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, they lived in Ventura, where he was a welding inspector for C.E. Miller Inc., a builder of offshore oil rigs. After he took a fall, he called it quits and they moved back north.

"He could no longer run across the I-beams," Shireen Watson said.

In 1986, he became a sales representative for a petroleum company and a purveyor of tungsten welding rods. He started his own welding rod sales company in 1995.

Watson was a Hercules planning commissioner from 1995 to 1996, when he was elected to the City Council, serving one four-year term. He lost a re-election bid in 2000.

"He was a very simple and a very honest man," said City Manager Mike Sakamoto. "He loved Hercules and only wanted what was best for the town."

Watson often visited with employees at City Hall, Sakamoto said, and was a strong supporter of law enforcement.

"He was very devoted to his wife and often commented to me that he never understood what she saw in him," Sakamoto said. "He was gregarious and in some ways just a simple country boy. We traded old euphemisms all the time. My favorite is still 'That's how the cow ate the cabbage.'"

Watson also served as president of the Foxboro Homeowners Association and helped create the Hercules Heritage Garden in the early 1990s.

He was a passionate race car fan, working for years as a starter for the Sports Car Club of America at Sears Point, now Infineon Raceway, and was especially proud to be backup starter for NASCAR races there.

"He was a very outgoing man; he just loved meeting people," Shireen Watson said. "I always said that D.T. had never met a stranger. He was just a wonderful, giving man."

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