I just read that Dr.Sammy Lee passed away. If you don’t recognize the name, he was famous nationally for bringing home to the USA several gold medals in the early Olympics in diving. He also was a major player in the civil rights movement. He’s worth a Google, if you’re young enough not to know of him. I was lucky enough to know him personally.

Sammy came to Santa Ana College where I taught SCUBA diving classes and helped to mentor our springboard divers. He taught them how to look good diving into the water, and I taught them how to stay alive and have fun under the water.

He became my hearing aid doctor early on in our relationship, and worked with, and on me, for many years before I retired and moved north to Washington State. This story is just one of many that could be told about Sammy, but it will give you an insight as to why everyone seemed to love him.

As I mentioned above, Sammy was a doctor that worked on the hard of hearing folks like me. His office was in Santa Ana and I was a regular customer/patient. His examination of me revealed that the outer ear canal, from the outside to the eardrum, was closing off. He thought it was occurring because of the constant exposure to cold ocean water. As a diver and instructor, I spent extensive time in the ocean. He said he could open them back up with an operation called an “exostosis”.

We made arrangements for me to check into the hospital to have both ears done. Remember, this is over 45 years ago when we didn’t have the equipment we have today, and it was a serious surgery then. I think it is more common now. They call it a surfer’s ear.

I checked into the hospital one afternoon, and spent that night. There were various tests done to get me ready for surgery in the morning. They wheeled me in, put me to sleep, and I woke up feeling just fine. Sammy said all went well and I could go home that afternoon.

When the time came for my release, (it sounds like I was in prison), they wheeled me out to the street in a wheelchair and I got up and started walking home. I only lived two miles from the hospital and didn’t have anyone to pick me up, so I planned to just walk home. I wasn’t hurting anywhere.

I had walked for about a half mile, when a car suddenly slammed on the brakes, and stopped alongside me on the road. I looked over and it was Sammy staring at me through the car window. He opened the door and said, “What are you doing out here? “

I told him I was just walking home. He said, “You can’t do that, you just had some major surgery.”

I said, “It doesn’t feel like it. I feel fine.”

His answer was, “If you don’t think it was major surgery, just look at your bill.” I got in the car still laughing. Sammy drove me home.

He was a dear friend, a credit to his country, a good doctor, and the world, country, and many others, like me, will miss him. People of his caliber are few and far between.

Chionodraco rastrospinosu

The bucket we found to carry the fish had been used to send something down to the station sometime in the past. There were no stores at McMurdo Station, and we saved and reused everything. This bucket was ugly. It was black, with yellow and red paint all over it, because it had been used several times for one thing or another. The top had a lid we could seal, with about 30 little tabs that could be bent down to lock it in place. It had a handle, and I carried it with me on the way home, never letting it get out of my sight.

At the end of the cruise, the 93 fish that were collected were very carefully injected, wrapped in cloth, and placed in the 5 gallon bucket. They were small, most about 6 inches. They belonged to New Zealand, and were loaned to me to take home and work on. This collection of fish was one of the main reasons for the entire expedition, and I had it, in a bucket, to carry home. It was a very heavy responsibility.

The trip home for me started on a ship, from the station to New Zealand. The bucket shared my bunk. In New Zealand, I had to wait for a military air transport flight to San Francisco, and the bucket shared my room with me. The flight to San Francisco was long, we didn’t have jets then, and the bucket shared my seat with me. We landed at Travis Air Force Base, in San Francisco.

They put me in a car and drove me to the San Francisco airport, where I would take a regular commercial flight home, to Southern California.

I had been gone for about five months. I had not shaved or cut my hair in that time. I had bright red hair down past my shoulders, and a full red beard all over my face. When I was on the ice, everyone look like that, but it was 1959, and the hippy movement hadn’t become popular in the cities yet, and I was to the city person, some sort of mountain man, and probably mentally deficient.

I was wearing a red plaid, wool shirt, and an old pair of wool Army issued pants. To make the picture complete. I was carrying my ugly bucket in one hand and my ice ax and my steel crampons in the other hand, because I couldn’t find any way to pack them. Can you imagine what would happen now, if I tried to get on an airplane with an ice ax and a bunch of metal crampons?!

I walked up to the counter to buy my ticket, set my bucket down and was totally unaware of how I was affecting those around me; I just asked for the first flight out to Los Angeles. The lady behind the counter, told me there is a plane leaving in 20 minutes, I think she just wanted to get rid of me as fast as possible, and gave me a ticket. I took my ticket, and reached down to pick up my bucket, and it was gone.

I panicked! I grabbed a lady standing next to me at the counter and said, “Did you see what happened to my bucket?”

Red Beard

She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were as big as saucers as she was shaking. I realized later that she was terrified from looking at me. Her husband said, “The custodian took the old bucket away that was sitting on the floor. Is that the one you mean? There he goes, over there,” and pointed. I looked through the crowd of people that were milling around, and he was headed for a door that said employees only. I panicked about losing my bucket, and being late for my flight, and ran after the man, calling out, “That’s my bucket.” and waving my arm in the air to get his attention. It just happened that the arm I was waving was also holding my ice ax and my crampons. People scattered, and I suddenly had a clear path to the custodian. I reached him just as he got to the door, and he, for the first time, heard me and turned around. I was right on him, waving my ice ax; he dropped the bucket, and slammed himself against the wall.

I didn’t have time to explain anything, I had to catch my flight. I picked up the bucket and just said, “That’s my bucket.” Then I turned and ran to catch my plane again. The people gave me a clear path, even though I was no longer waving my ice ax around.

I made my plane and sat in the backseat, by myself, okay with my bucket and ice ax. The flight attendant came back after we got in the air, and in a nice calm voice asked, ‘Where are you coming from?” I told her the Antarctic, and she asked, “How did you get to the San Francisco airport?” I told her it had all been military transportation. She just said, “Well, that explains a lot,” and left. It wasn’t until then, that I realized what had just happened. I chuckled to myself all the way home.

When I got home, I looked in the mirror and I even scared myself.

Ross Sea, January 1959

Sometime before our departure for the Antarctic, in October 1958, it was agreed upon by Dr. Miller that he would be a guest of the New Zealand Oceanographic Institute on their oceanic cruise aboard the HMNZS Endeavor in January, 1959. Due to circumstances, Dr. Miller was unable to meet the scheduled cruise and being his assistant, I took his place on the ship as the USA representative.

The Endeavor is a wooden ship of 185 feet. It was not an icebreaker and the crew lived in constant fear of being closed in by the pack ice and crushed. There were many of our scheduled stations, which we could not run because of pack ice.

The scientific personnel consisted of five New Zealand scientists and myself. We were scheduled to run 40 research stations when we left McMurdo in January. Due to the lack of time and bad weather, we ran only 20. We had a standard procedure at each station, which was as follows:

• First, a sounding was taken by exploding a submerged hand grenade and calculating the depth of the water by the time it took for the shock wave to hit the bottom and bounce back to the surface. This was the only method of sounding we had.
• Next, when the depth was established, a wire cable was sent to the bottom with a heavy weight and reversing water bottles strapped at intervals from the bottom to the surface. They record temperature, pressure, and bring back a sample of the water at each depth.
• Third, a Bathythermograph record was taken.
• Fourth, we sent a plankton net, a meter in diameter, to the bottom and took a vertical sample, from the bottom to the surface.
• We took bottom samples with a 100 pound orange peel grab to depths of 6000 feet.
• We would then put in the bottom fish trawl/net and pull it for about 30 minutes across the bottom.

Accomplishing the above took from seven hours to as long as fifteen hours, depending on the depth of the water. At a deep station, it would take as much as an hour and a half, just to lower and raise the wire to the bottom and back.

All six of us would work each station. It kept three men busy, just sorting the material and storing it in the containers for three to six hours during each station. The collection and preservation and storage had to be done quickly or the samples would freeze solid on the deck. When several of the men became ill, it increased our workload and slowed our progress tremendously, making the work situation worse.

A storm hit us after we were out for one week, and all operations stopped. The seas became so rough that the captain went off course nearly two-hundred miles because he was afraid of coming around in the seas that were as high as ninety foot waves. When he finally decided to turn, he sent word to all hands that they were to be prepared for a heavy role. The ship came about, but it did take a 62° role in doing so.

There were not many humorous happenings on the cruise. It was cold 98% of the time and just plain hard work. However, there was one situation that we all, well almost all, laughed at.

When the ship was brought about in the storm, and took a 62° role, we were eating breakfast in our scientific quartiers. We ate at a long table that was set across the ship from side to side. There were six of us, three sat on one side, two, on the other side, and one on the end of the table. Breakfast on the New Zealand ship started every morning with a bowl of oatmeal. It was served in a heavy bowl with a wide-spreading brim around the edge. Each of us had a space in front of us that was fenced in with a little wooden fence, about one inch high, so our food wouldn’t slide as the ship rolled from side to side. This is standard on many oceangoing vessels.

We were in the oatmeal part of our breakfast, when the captain decided to come about. That was when we took the 62° role. All six of us thought we were going to capsize, and grabbed the table to keep from falling over onto the floor. That left six bowls of oatmeal free to slide over the little fences, bump-bump-bump, and onto the man at the end of the table, who had to let go of the table to protect himself from the flying oatmeal bowls, and was now flat on his back covered in oatmeal.

Once the boat came back from the role, and we decided we were not all going to die, we couldn’t stop laughing at our slimy comrade. It took about two days before he started to laugh.

We caught 93 fish, which we preserved. I got to bring them home with me when I left the ice, and take them back to Long Beach State College, on loan from New Zealand, to work on my Master’s degree with them.

The next blog will tell the story of how the fish got to Long Beach to be studied….Funny.

I was living on a 40 foot sailboat, I rented for a year, and had the opportunity to make a friend that I didn’t take. It is one of the few things in my life that I would change if I could.

The boat I lived on was kept in a slip in Newport Beach, California. I was renting it for only $50 a month because the owners had two, full-size, Standard poodles aboard that I was looking after, while they were on a year-long teaching assignment out of the country. I took the two dogs for a walk at 6 AM every morning before I went to work at Santa Ana College.

One morning, as the dogs and I were finishing our walk, a man came out of his house and picked up his newspaper from the lawn. He was in a bathrobe and slippers. I knew who he was, and I knew that he lived there – everyone knew he lived there.

He was only 15 feet from me, so I said, “Good morning, John.” He looked up at me and I could tell he was trying to figure out who I was, so I continued the conversation with, “I thought about saying good morning Duke, but I don’t know you well enough to do that. I also considered good morning Mr. Wayne, but I’ve seen all of your movies, and that seemed too formal. The only thing left was John.”

He broke into a real belly laugh at that and said, “Come on in and have a cup of coffee.” Then I made the only big mistake I ever made in my whole life.

I said, “Thank you, but I have a class waiting for me at the college. I have to be there by 8 o’clock.” We said a few more words back and forth and laughed a little bit and then I took the dogs and we went back to the boat, and I went to work.

 My mistake was entirely my father’s fault, he’s the one that taught me my work ethic.

This isn’t Dave, but it’s a good picture.

This isn’t Dave, but it looks a lot like him.

I have made many good friends in the diving world, one of them is Dave McLaren. I met Dave at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. When I was the course director of a diving instructors program. He was on my staff. Dave now lives in Texas. He has been reading my blog and contacted me about an article he wrote for a magazine in British Columbia in 1991. He thought my blog readers would enjoy reading it. He sent it to me, and I agreed, so I retyped it. If there are any errors in it, it’s my typing, not his, and I left some out to shorten it for the blog.
“The waters off Canada’s West Coast team with life………….. One of these creatures, the octopus, is startling divers and scientists by displaying large amounts of an unsuspected quality: intelligence. Long believed to be the evil devilfish, lying in wait to reach out and drag unwary fisherman screaming to their dooms, the octopus is, in truth, a shy, timid creature who wants above all to be left alone……….. Cousteau after studying the octopus, called it the “soft intelligence.”
Some years ago, I had occasion to meet an octopus informally. Intimately.
We were returning from an enjoyable but uneventful dive off of Whytecliffe Park in West Vancouver, and were making our way slowly upward along a fissure in the rock face. An octopus was gliding on his tentacles down the same fissure, when we met at a depth of 30 feet.

We estimated him to be 12 feet across as he backed slowly and wearily into a recess. He curled his eight tentacles beneath himself and sat watching us. I reached out with one finger on my gloved left hand, and stroked him gently between the eyes, which diver lore said would pacify him. He backed up a little more, staring impassively at me with his unwinking, golden eyes. I stroked him again, and he stopped backing away, so my companion and I vented (the air out of) our suits and settled on the bottom to enjoy his nearness. For several minutes divers and octopus watched one another’s movements.
I looked over at Ann Williams, my diving buddy. She was grinning with delight, her shoulders hunched in a characteristic gesture of hers that says, “Wow!”
One tentacle moved from beneath the octopus’s body, slowly uncoiling toward me, until the delicate tip touched my left mitt. It was as if we could hear him thinking, “Hmm… normal temperature; soft; no mucus membrane.”
The tentacle moved up the arm of my nylon suit. “Different texture.”
The tip touched the face of the gauge on my arm. “Different texture again! What are these creatures made of?”
The tentacle moved smoothly, walking on sucker disks until it lay up my arm, from my fingertips to my shoulder. A second tentacle uncoiled then as the octopus, his curiosity fully around, continued his investigation of the two strange beings who had entered his domain. It touched the Mitt on my right hand, and worked its way up past my elbow to my shoulder, giving tentative tugs along both arms as if to assess mass and holding power.
“So far, so good,” he seemed to conclude. “The creatures seem passive and friendly. Perhaps touching between the eyes is a gesture of friendship in their home area. I’ll try it.”
A third tentacle uncoiled, whip-like, through the water, faster this time, more confident. It’s touched my forehead above my mask, and began exploring. It moved over and around my hood, onto my mask faceplate, down on to my regulator mouthpiece. The octopus’s thoughts were clear: “This part is moving.”
He gave light tugs on the regulator second stage. The sensitive tentacle tip moved over my rubber mouthpiece and touched my beard. There was a momentary hesitation, a drawing back, then it touched my beard again. “Parasitic growth?”
The probing continued, touching my lip. I felt the tentacle tip probe between my lips and touch my teeth on the right side of my mouth. It moved slowly into my mouth along my teeth, all the way back to my molars. I thought about the movie Alien.
At this point, I felt the exploration had progressed far enough, and gently shook my upper body, head, and arms.

The octopus immediately let go with all three tentacles. He did not withdraw them, though, and after a few seconds, he gently put them back on me. Again I gave a slight shrug, and again the octopus let go. This time, he retracted his tentacles to their original position beneath his body.  His thoughts reached us through the water. “I must have frightened them. Sorry about that!”
We regarded one another quietly for another few moments, then the octopus moved away from the wall, toward Ann and me. Unhurried and unworried, he passed between us, moving down the seabed to deeper water. We watched him amble off, remaining stock–still ourselves. He neither stopped nor look back.
Ann finally nudged me on the shoulder, indicating that we should resume our ascent. Reluctantly, we did.
Back on shore. We must have looked like a pair of fools. We couldn’t stop grinning all day.”

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. Thank you Dave McLaren.