He snuck into a Detroit induction center on a borrowed Saturday to take the pilot's test the Army wouldn't give him. He landed a disabled aircraft at Tuskegee without a working control stick — fire trucks lining the runway, waiting for a crash. He flew three wars across 41 years and logged over 15,000 hours. His wings order — Personnel Orders No. 52, Maxwell Field, December 13, 1944, signed by command of Brigadier General Gravely — still exists. The graduation program from December 28, 1944 still exists. The transfer orders to the 617th Bomb Squadron still exist. The paper trail of a man who was told he couldn't fly is intact and in the family's hands. The A-11 hack watch was built for pilots like him. The "hack" — stopping time, synchronizing with precision before a mission — is both the watch's mechanism and the discipline he embodied every time he went up.

He came home from WWII and joined the FDNY in 1947. He served 20 years, rising to Lieutenant — interrupted twice by military activations for Korea and Vietnam, each time going back to the firehouse when he returned. When he finally retired from the FDNY in 1967, he became one of the first Federal Sky Marshals, flying commercial routes with TWA at a time when hijacking was a real and growing threat. Then 21 years as a U.S. Customs Inspector at JFK. Three pensions. Three complete careers — all requiring the same cool under pressure that he first learned in a cockpit.

This is the story that should be on the caseback.

John Ira Mulzac was stationed at Selfridge Field, Michigan — assigned to the 332nd Fighter Group as a radio technician, the top man in his unit. He would later be assigned to the 617th Bomb Squadron alongside Ivan J. McRae Jr. — the same McRae who would walk into Bulova's R&D Laboratories nine years after the war ended. He wanted to fly. But the official path to pilot training required college credits he didn't have, and the Air Force system wasn't going to give him a way in.

One Saturday, a friend was driving a truck into Detroit to pick up provisions for the base. Mulzac asked to ride along — didn't say why. His friend dropped him at the civilian induction center: the place where men came to enlist, not where serving soldiers applied for anything. Inside, two sergeants. A white sergeant told him no. A Black sergeant said: "Go ahead, let him take the test. What difference does it make?"

He took the test. His friend came back. They returned to base.

Three weeks later, his commanding officer — Captain Tresville, West Point graduate — called him in. A letter had arrived ordering Mulzac to Biloxi, Mississippi to begin pilot training. Tresville tried to stop him: "I have a good mind not to let you go. You're my top man." Mulzac told him: "Sir, I always want to be like you. I want to fly."

Tresville let him go. Then he picked up the phone and called Detroit — and closed the loophole for everyone else. Mulzac's buddies found out and wanted to do the same. They were already too late.

Captain Tresville was later killed in Italy. The advice he gave Mulzac as he left — "there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots" — Mulzac carried for thirty years of flying.

That act of quiet determination in a Detroit induction center, on a borrowed Saturday, is what made John Mulzac a pilot. His grandson Tobias Harris now plays for the Detroit Pistons — currently in his second stint in the city. The place that launched one legacy now hosts another.

His name does not appear on the Class 44-J Student Honors list — those honors went to men who had finished school. He hadn't. He got in the room anyway, and graduated as a twin-engine pilot. He never finished high school. He made sure all 8 of his children went to college. Within ten blocks of his Bedford-Stuyvesant home, he owned 22 pieces of property — real estate accumulated quietly, deliberately, in pre-gentrification Brooklyn. To his family he was Daddy John: a prankster and storyteller who could hold a room. He had 22 grandchildren and 8 great-grandchildren. Son Robert followed him into the FDNY and retired as a Lieutenant. Son Henry retired as an NYPD detective. Grandson Tobias Harris plays for the Detroit Pistons — the city where his grandfather first became a pilot.

This is what the watch is really about: a man who built things. In the air, on the ground, in the family he raised. A timepiece is exactly the right object to hold that story.