Diving in the Fifties and Sixties was a real rush!
Consider just where a person would start to educate themselves once they have the apparatus in hand to either explore underwater, see the inhabitants, find relicts or die trying.
To keep the latter from happening, it became necessary for me to first read a small manual that came with the aqualung and then experiment with it in a controlled environment where any minor mistake wouldn’t turn into a major one. To accomplish this, I took it into the swimming pool where I was on the swim team in college. Other team members and I spent a considerable amount of time seeing just what this device would allow us to do. It was amazing to stay underwater with no thought of having to return to the surface for that necessary breath of air.
The pool experiment was a great initiation to what it was like to not only be under water, without having to surface for air, but also have the vision and mobility to move in whatever direction we wanted at will. This being learned just fueled the drive to expand my exploration into the largest body of water that Cleveland, Ohio had to offer, Lake Erie.
Returning to the sporting goods store where I purchased the diving lung, I asked if there was any organization I could get in touch with to learn, first hand, the art of mastering it. They did have the name of a small club in the area that consisted of divers that came together in order to promote the sport of exploring the lake. The club was known as the Cleveland Skin Divers and appropriately they held their meetings at the Cleveland Aquarium.
After attending one of their meetings, going through a brief pool test and paying my dues into the club, I was on my way to starting my sixty plus years of diving.
I look back on those beginning years and really enjoyed being able to enter a sport that was on its way to becoming not only one of the most popular hobbies but would grow into a means for a person to explore areas of our planet that heretofore eluded them. Sure it’s always fun to go and visit the fishes or other creatures that live in water, but what about all the other things that scientists, explorers, treasure hunters and salvage crews have all been able to accomplish with this device.
Where did we get our tanks filled? One of the only places that pumped air was a welding supply company down in what was known in Cleveland as the "Flats." This was located along the Cuyahoga River where all the major industry had their operations.
Our club members became frequent customers of theirs and struck up somewhat of a friendship with the employees asking us where we had dived and where we would be going next.
At that time, the only tanks available were 72 cubic foot steel ones that were rated to 2,400 pounds of pressure. We would ask if it was possible to over fill the tanks to give us some additional time underwater but they would not, saying they could be fined if a inspector came in and learned that they did overfill. After about a year of being a regular customer they started to overfill our tanks to 3,000 psi as long as we were going to use them the next day. Nowadays it's common practice to fill these same type of tanks to 3,000 psi.
We were surprised when we later learned that the welding shop had a couple of explosions at their location but kept open to serve our needs. No matter how careful you are, when working with compressed gases, there can still be mistakes, but this was the only source until into the mid 60s.
Portable compressors began to be popular due to the lack of places to get air. You could pick the compressor alone up at an army surplus store back then. Army surplus stores, after the war, were the most interesting place for a young person to investigate. They had bins of helmets, canteens, clothes, and along with this was various components of tanks, airplanes and other types of vehicles that were used and sometimes new.
One of these pieces of equipment was a small air compressor that had been connected to storage tanks for raising and lowering the landing gears on an airplane. Like most everything there, you could pick these up for a very reasonable price. It was normally run with a 24 volt motor while in the airplane, but for diving the purchaser would remove the motor and replace it with a pulley that would then be connected to a small gasoline motor.
I had a friend by the name of Dave that constructed one of these compressors and we took it on a week long trip to Tobermory, Canada to fill our tanks. It would take about 3/4 to one hour to fill a single tank. But we did not dive all day, so by taking a couple of tanks apiece, we would refill during downtime. It was a very compact unit so he could carry it on the back of his boat for convenient filling even when out on the water
The company that made these compressors recognized what the divers were doing with their surplus ones from the war, so it wasn't very long before they offered a commercial set up that was user ready without all the retrofitting.
I mentioned in my book about getting into training of divers at the Y.M.C.A. I taught for two years, starting in 1960, with a course I made up from what was available to read on the subject as well as inserting my four years of experience I learned by the seat of my pants, or should I say wet suit.
Just to give you an example of what I expected from my students, following is the two-page exam I required them to pass before I felt they were ready for diving.
As you can see, I wasn't that soft on the students but I felt if they were going to do what I was doing for four years they had to be even more prepared than I was.
Following my program, the Y came up with their own and I taught that for the next five years before turning it over to another instructor. At this time I was living in Stow, Ohio which was just down the road from Kent State University. Yes, the one where the riots took place in May of 1970.
I was contacted by a group of university students that were interested in taking lessons to dive. They asked if I would volunteer to teach at the college. Seeing it was close to home I agreed to teach in the evenings. I did this for two years, and at the end of the last class the members asked me it I could provide them with Y.M.C.A. certification cards because being certified was getting to be a more popular requirement for charter boats and there was no Y in the Kent area.
I said I would look into it and contacted the Y.M.C.A. scuba training department explaining the fact that I would be able to certify about 30 students who would be grateful to pay the going rate for the certification I had already taught. The contact at the training facility asked when I last taught and I told them about two years ago. I was abruptly told they now had a new rule where an instructor had to be re-certified every two years and the cost would be $250.
Well seeing that the fee for becoming an instructor when I began, seven years back, was only $50 and I was teaching for nothing, both at the Y as well as Kent State, I told them they just lost revenue from 30 students and I was going to retire from teaching. Just for a comparison, in order to become a certified instructor today the full course can run about $3,000.
I really enjoyed teaching, but it started getting in the way of my regular work schedule seeing it was necessary for me to travel occasionally from the Ohio operation. What it did for me in retrospect was to continue going over the various details of diving to the point that it became almost a knee jerk reaction when faced with situations underwater that might have been more difficult to cope with had I not been able to rely on my own training.
For this reason if you do take a course in diving, much like any sport, repetition becomes so important in mastering the various components to the point that it becomes second nature. If you stop diving for a number of years, it's suggested that you enter a pool refresher course to renew the confidence you once had.
Stay Safe!
George