<< Back to Calypso Days

My grandson says nobody reads long pages on the Internet. My grandson can skip this one.

I was born in 1928 and grew up in Palatka, Florida, on the St. Johns River, where my father ran a little fish camp with six rowboats and a bait tank. The river is the color of strong tea, and I spent every summer of my boyhood in it, diving for lost lures off the dock and selling them back to the fishermen who'd lost them. That was my first salvage business. My mother said I had gills.

I finished high school in June of 1946 and joined the Navy the next week. The war was over and I'd missed it, which my mother counted as the best news of her life. Boot camp was at Great Lakes, where a Florida boy saw snow for the first time and did not care for it. That fall I talked my way into the Navy's diving school at the Washington Navy Yard.

Here's what a hard-hat diver wore. Wool long johns, two pairs of socks. A suit of canvas and rubber, which two tenders held open while you climbed into it feet first. A copper breastplate bolted onto the collar. A belt of lead weights around your middle, and shoes with lead soles. Then the helmet, the old Mark V, copper and brass with a round faceplate in front and little windows on the sides and top. They set it on your breastplate and gave it a twist to lock it on, and then they screwed the faceplate shut. Close to two hundred pounds, all told. On deck you could barely walk. In the water you didn't feel it at all.

Your air came down a hose from the surface, and there was a telephone in the helmet, so you could talk to the man topside if the line was working, which it mostly was. There was a button inside the helmet you pushed with your chin to let air out, and you learned to work it without thinking, the way you learn to work a clutch. And there was your lifeline, with pull signals for when the phone quit: one pull meant I'm all right, and four pulls meant haul me up. I never had to give four. I came close twice.

My first dive in open water was in the river by the Yard. I went down the ladder and the light went brown, then black. I put my glove flat against the faceplate and could not see it. I stood on the bottom with my heart going like a hammer and the instructor on the phone telling me to report my condition. I reported that I was fine. I was eighteen and I was lying. By the end of the week I loved it.

The Navy put me on salvage, and salvage I stayed for twenty years, mostly out of Norfolk. We raised boats that had sunk at their moorings, patched hulls, cleared wrecks out of channels, recovered anchors and propellers and, once, a crate of typewriters. I learned to cut steel underwater with a torch, which is about as strange a thing as a man can do. You work by feel nine times out of ten. You learn a ship's hull with your hands the way a blind man learns a face.

I married Eunice in 1949. She was a telephone operator in Norfolk and she said she married me because I was the only sailor who called her ma'am. Larry came along in 1950 and Sally in 1951. I spent a good part of 1951 on a salvage ship off Korea, clearing harbors. I'll leave it at that.

Hard-hat diving is hard on a body. I saw men get the bends, and I spent two long nights in a recompression chamber myself over the years. Both times I came out fine, because somebody topside knew his business. I never forgot it, and I never let a student forget it either. Respect your tables, come up slow, and say thank you to your tenders.

I made First Class Diver, and later Chief, and I retired from the Navy in 1966 with twenty years in. The Navy was good to me. I hope I was good to the Navy.

In 1953 I read The Silent World, the Captain's book, twice through. That summer my old tender and best friend, Al Levy, bought an Aqua-Lung, one of the first I ever saw for sale in a store, and the two of us took it down to Key West on leave. I'd been diving for seven years by then, and I had never once seen clear water.

I strapped that tank on, put the mouthpiece in, and went over the side of a rented skiff. No hose, no helmet, no lead shoes. I hung there in water as clear as a window, over a reef full of fish in colors I did not have names for, and I turned slowly all the way around and then upside down. Seven years I had walked on the bottom. That afternoon, I flew. When I came up, Al said I was laughing into the mouthpiece the whole time. I don't doubt it.

In the fall of 1956 Eunice and I saw The Silent World at a movie house in Norfolk. All those people in the seats, gasping at the very thing I'd felt off Key West. It was like watching somebody tell your secret to the whole world, and being glad they did.

When I got out, Eunice wanted warm weather and I wanted clear water, so we came home to Florida and settled outside Fort Pierce. For eight years I worked for a commercial salvage outfit up and down the coast. After every big blow there were boats on the bottom of every marina from here to Miami, and we brought them up. We inspected bridge pilings and pier footings, freed fouled propellers, and once spent three days looking for a man's false teeth off a fishing pier. (Found them.) By then I was wearing a tank on my back more often than a helmet. The world had caught up to the Captain.

The YMCA started one of the first national scuba courses in the country back in 1959. In 1968 I took their instructor course and started teaching two nights a week in the pool, with open water dives on Saturday mornings. I kept at it for twenty-six years. A little over a thousand students: doctors, shrimpers, schoolteachers, a retired judge, a lot of teenagers, a few grandmothers, and one fellow who wanted to learn so he could propose to his girl underwater. (She said yes, in sign language.) Not one of them got hurt on my watch. That's the thing I'm proudest of in my whole life, after my children.

I hung up my instructor's card in 1994, at 66. My knees decided that, not me.

These days I snorkel off the beach in the summer with the grandchildren, and I'm slower than they are, and they think that's funny. On the bookshelf in the den sits an old Mark V helmet I bought at a surplus sale in 1972, polished up. Eunice dusts around it and says it's the ugliest thing in the house. Then she polishes it again before company comes.

Fifty-three years since I first went down a ladder in lead shoes. I wouldn't trade a day of it.

<< Back to Calypso Days  |  [email protected]