‘Waterquake’: Santa Rosa resident recalls inventing satirical board game

Former longtime Piner High School teacher Kenneth Fox gets excited when he talks about all the parallels he sees between the Watergate scandal of the 1970s and the Jan. 6 hearings and other events involving the Trump administration going on today.

“What’s incredible is what’s going on with (former President Donald J.) Trump and his problem with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife telling the press things and (former Attorney General) John Mitchell’s wife (Martha) getting drunk and talking to the press. That’s a similarity,” he said, animated. “What brought them all down in Watergate were the tapes of (then-President Richard M.) Nixon saying things like it would be easy to raise a million dollars to pay hush money. What’s happening in the Jan. 6 committee now? They are listening to recordings of interviews and past comments made by some of Trump’s staff.”

Fox, a Santa Rosa resident who taught history and other subjects at Piner for 38 years and is still substitute teaching at Santa Rosa City Schools’ summer school at the age of 88, remembers all too well the time when America was rocked by the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex, which set off the investigation into and eventual resignation of a president.

At the time, in 1972, Fox had a dream about creating a satirical game about it. He’d just been thinking about some of the ridiculous names and events involved, he said, such as business owner and Nixon confidante Bebe Rebozo and Mitchell’s drunken wife and her over-the-top cat’s-eye glasses.

“When I woke up I told my wife, Page, about it, and she thought it was a good idea,” he recalled.

That was late 1972 and by 1973 he and his family had created and started selling “Waterquake,” a Monopoly-like board game, with political campaign buttons bearing the slightly altered names of the figures involved. He said he was the first to copyright a Watergate game.

For example, then-Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s button says McNotgovern, former White House counsel John Dean was called John Clean and former Vice President Spiro Agnew’s name was changed to I. Knew.

Why ‘Waterquake?’

“Watergate shook up the country, and so do earthquakes,” Fox explained.

The object of the game is to get your candidate elected president by capturing electoral votes, in the form of poker chips. You have several ways to reach your goal of moving to the center of the board, “The Public Sector,” including the Dirty Tricks path.

“That was my daughter’s idea; she said ‘Why don’t you create a way for people to cheat?’ ” Fox recalled.

All the loose elements, including fake $500,000 and $1 million bills are stashed in a bag labeled “Laundered Money,” and as the buttons move around the board they draw from different stacks of cards like “Dirty Tricks,” “Play It Straight,” “Grand Jury” and “Presidential” cards to win electoral votes or cash.

For example, a “Play It Straight Card” reads: ”You refuse to believe John Soberman, John Smoothpipe or Chuck Folsom. You are an excellent judge of characters’ character! Tell any opponent to pick up a grand jury card.”

There is also a rubbery “bug” included in each game, based on all the wiretaps and recording devices discussed during the course of the Senate’s Watergate Committee hearings.

“Can you tell I was having fun doing all this?” Fox beamed.

Fox said he and Page had to learn the ins and outs of having the game printed, marketed, sold and placed in stores or mailed, including being turned down by well-known game makers, such as Milton Bradley, because the idea was “too political.”

The family of six lived in Sebastopol at the time and as soon as word got out, Fox was interviewed by The Press Democrat, and the story was picked up by wire services. He was flooded with interview requests from larger papers, radio and television stations.

His son, John, who was 5 in 1973, recalls a trip the family went on to Canada to get a passport for an exchange student from Brazil who was living with them.

“Along the way we stopped at all the TV and radio stations for interviews. That was very exciting for me,” he said.

The younger Fox, 53, a wellness manager at the Community Market in Santa Rosa, sports a long beard and doesn’t bear much resemblance to the little boy sticking his tongue out in a family photo promoting the game. He said he also remembers accompanying his dad to Berkeley to a commune to find an artist to draw the box cover.

The game sold 200,000 copies, and many Democrats bought it as gag gifts for their Republican friends, he said.

The family delivered games to Nixon at his “Western White House” in San Clemente and to news anchor Walter Cronkite. And when Senate Watergate Committee Chair Sam Ervin visited Santa Rosa, the elder Fox hand-delivered a game to him.

Games that were mailed brought in the most bucks, because stores like the Emporium, which agreed to stock the game, took all but $1 off the top. The game retailed for about $10 to $13, he said.

The pipe shop at the Watergate Apartments in Washington, D.C. sold the most — 4,500— because they were popular with the tourists.

Alas, the game’s appeal lasted only about a 18 months.

“Then everyone wanted to forget about Watergate,” Fox said. “But who would have known that Deep Throat, Mark Felt, would one day live less than a mile from Piner High School where I taught!”

Fox, an Oaklynn, New Jersey native and UCLA grad, started his career working as a marketing representative for Ford Motor Company, and still has a 1966 powder blue Mustang that he bought new at the time.

But Fox seemed to find his niche as a teacher, first in West Covina and then in Santa Rosa.

He said he loves delving into past historical events like the John F. Kennedy assassination and the characters involved, including Santa Rosa resident Ruth Paine, who owned the boardinghouse in Dallas where officials believe suspected Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald stayed the night before he is believed to have shot the former president.

He said after the game came out, a teacher from San Bernardino wrote to criticize him.

She said “How could you make money off of such a tragedy?” Fox recalled. “I wrote back and said all the people going to prison are going to write books and make money off Watergate,” he said. “And I didn’t even commit a crime.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kathleen Coates at kathleen.coates@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5209.