I cited Watson and Crick '53 in my PhD thesis and I did go dig it up and read it.

I had to go to the basement of the library, use some sort of weird rotating knob to move a heavy stack of journals over, find some large bound book of the year's journals, and navigate to the paper. When I got the page, it had been cut out by somebody previous and replaced with a photocopied verison.

(I also invested a HUGE amount of my time into my bibliography in every paper I've written as first author, curating a database and writing scripts to format in the various journal formats. This involved multiple independent checks from several sources, repeated several times.