My first mechanical watch

Juscelino Kubitschek, with his Ford Galaxie

There's a watch in a display case at the JK Memorial in Brasília that I've been chasing for twenty years. It's a Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust in yellow gold, displayed among Juscelino Kubitschek's personal belongings, such as his Ford Galaxie, presidential sash, and clothes he wore. Most visitors pass by it without stopping; it's just a gold watch belonging to a man who was president. I stopped. I stopped for the first time in 2005, newly arrived in the city, and I stopped again now, in June 2026, holding my daughter's hand. Between one stop and another lie two decades of unanswered contacts, formal requests based on the Access to Information Law, administrative appeals rejected one by one, and, ultimately, the intervention of the Public Prosecutor's Office. There's also the discovery, more painful than I expected, that the very institution responsible for preserving JK's memory had lost track of that object. And finally, there's a twist of fate that happened purely by chance and allowed me, at last, to write what follows.

Those who follow the Mechanical Clocks blog know that I've been doing this work since 1999, without sponsorship, without receiving a single watch, and without ever earning a penny. It's an expensive addiction that drains time and patience, and the part nobody sees is the research: the correspondence that doesn't return, the archive that doesn't exist, the curator who doesn't respond.

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I've already recounted, in another text, the frustrations of an amateur horologist, and the story of JK's watch was the first on the list. In 2005, I wrote to the Memorial asking what they knew about the piece, whether it was indeed the watch he wore, what the serial number was, and if there were photographs of the president wearing it.