In a League of Their Own

In a League of Their Own Three commercial divers stand out in Women Divers Hall of Fame

THERE’S A GROUP OF WOMEN divers who share an achievement that’s so rare that it could be compared to the most exclusive clubs in the world of sports, such as baseball players with 600 career home runs and running backs with 2,000 rushing yards in a season.

Norma Hanson, Dolores E. Fisher and Tamara Brown are the only three commercial divers to be inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame, an organization based in New York City that is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2010.

The Hall of Fame has published a booklet honoring its 176 inductees from all over the world, women who have made a mark in virtually every category of diving. The Hall of Fame recognizes women in many areas, such as underwater filmmaking and photography, wreck diving, cave diving, scuba-industry leaders, military divers, research scientists, instructors, marine scientists and conservationists and underwater archaeologists. Even underwater hockey players get their due.

But in the world of commercial diving, Hanson, Fisher and Brown stand alone.

Norma Hanson

Hanson began hard-hat diving in 1949, according to the Women Divers Hall of Fame, working in both the commercial abalone and underwater construction industries. By 1957, she’d made more than 4,000 dives in heavy gear and was the second woman to join Hard hat diver Norma Hanson. California’s Piledrivers, Bridge and Dockworkers Union Local 2375.

Hanson set the women’s world depth record for diving on air at 220 feet in the 1950s and performed for the glass-bottom-boat shows at Santa Catalina Island in California. One of the most intriguing stories Hanson often told involved a surprise visitor at one of those shows. As the divers got into position, Hanson’s husband, Alfred, saw a great white shark and warned the line tender on the boat. He in turn relayed the message down the line to Norma.

“I look down and here’s this great white shark coming up with its mouth wide open, row after row after row of teeth,” she was quoted as saying by the Women Divers Hall of Fame. “I was just in position where I could kick it in the nose. I gave it a hard kick, and it veered off. Of course, my line tender pulled me right up. I was so frightened, I couldn’t stand up. I had super-deluxe rubber legs.”

About half an hour later, Norma was back in the water for another show. She realized later that she should have suspected trouble when she noticed the absence of the hundreds of little fish that showed up daily to be fed. “The funny part was, some of the people on the glass-bottom boat saw the whole thing, and they thought we had a trained shark,” she said. “We heard they wanted to take the trip again so they could take pictures of it.”

In her 50 years as a commercial diver, she served as foreman and tender on pile-wrapping and harbor-maintenance jobs, did harbor inspections and traveled the world training commercial divers, the Hall of Fame said. She and her husband wrote “More Than Nine Lives,” chronicling their lives as commercial divers on the West Coast. They also worked as divers and consultants for Walt Disney Studios, where they worked on movies such as “20000 Leagues Under the Sea.” They retired from the industry as chief divers for the Port of Los Angeles in 1988.

Leslie Leaney, the founder of the Santa Maria, Calif.-based Historical Diving Society USA, counted the late Norma Hanson among his personal friends.

“Norma Hanson was a bona-fide, card-carrying union member with many more hours underwater than a lot of the men,” Leaney said. “She operated post World War II out of Southern California and garnered lots of press because of her unusual status and employment. I knew her in her later years. She was not the macho, hardnosed woman I expected. She had an elegance and a softness that was disarming. She was like a favorite aunt, but wearing clothes with diving-helmet motifs on them.” (Women’s Equipment Test Team)

Last breath of fresh air is gulped by Dolores Fisher before a practice run at underwater endurance record. Mrs. Fisher ended up breaking the record with a time of 55 hours and 37 minutes. Image courtesy Women Divers Hall of Fame.

Flier for “Aloha Days,” the event where Mrs. Fisher would break the underwater endurance record.

Dolores E. Fisher

In 1953, Fisher fell in love with both her husband, Mel, and the ocean, according to the Women Divers Hall of Fame. The native of Montana was a stranger to the ocean, but on the couple’s honeymoon, they went diving to explore shipwrecks off the Florida Keys. They planned to open a store devoted exclusively to diving, and to raise money for the endeavor, they dove commercially for lobster in the frigid waters off California.

The grueling but lucrative work paid off when they opened Mel’s Aqua Shop in Redondo Beach, Calif., the world’s first “dive shop,” according to the Women Divers Hall of Fame. The Fishers, who are now deceased, trained more than 65,000 students in scuba diving. But more impressively, Dolores, nicknamed “Deo,” set a world underwater endurance record at 55 hours and 37 minutes that still stands today, the Hall of Fame said.

In 1963, the Fishers and their four children moved to Florida to begin treasure hunting off the Treasure Coast, and they later moved to the Florida Keys. On July 20, 1985, they made the find that would earn them fame and define their careers, locating the sunken Nuestra Senora de Atocha ship, with more than 40 tons of silver and gold worth an estimated $450 million.

Tamara Brown

Brown started commercial diving at the the age of 18 under the direction of her father, her, William Brown, who founded the Divers vers Academy International school in Erial, N.J., N.J., in 1977. According to the Women Divers Hall Hall of Fame, William Brown was fond of saying, ying, “Just do it. Time is money, and we have no time o time to waste.”

Brown became the director of Divers Academy cademy International in 1990, and in 2006, she purchased rchased 100 percent of the company, one of the largest largest commercial diving schools in the United States, d States, from her family. She moved the school into a new, to a new, state-of-the art training facility in a 60-foot-deep, oot-deep, 40-acre dive quarry with a large administration nistration building. She serves as president of the company, company, which is based near Atlantic City.

“Commercial diving has been a rewarding and arding and challenging career as a woman in a very demanding demanding industry,” Brown told the Women Divers Hall of Fame. Hall of Fame. “Respect was earned, not given, but well worth the ll worth the challenge. Every commercial dive is exciting, and being ng, and being able to work with some high-tech equipment to inspect pment to ins ect bridges, install fiber-optic cables and working on oil rigs king on oil rigs is really awesome. Some of the biggest challenges as a challenges as a woman have been gaining acceptance and respect from a respect from a tough crew of men. But if you keep doing the right thing, the right thing, it all comes together, and that is by far easier compared to sier compared to diving in the Delaware River.”

Brown also is president of the Association of Commercial on of Commercial Diving Educators and chairwoman of the committee that wrote and published the American National Standards Institute/ACDE commercial diving certification standards.

“She was one of the earliest commercial divers, and now she runs a commercial dive school, so it’s kind of amazing that she’s now instrumental in training commercial divers,” said Bobbie Scholley, a retired Navy diver and the president of the Women Divers Hall of Fame. “She’s not only showing young women that it’s possible to be out there doing it, but that you can also make a career out of it and become somebody who makes a difference in the commercial dive world. She’s highly respected in the commercial world, which is a tough world to be in, and is really setting a standard.”

Scholley and her group have set a goal of ensuring that Hanson, Fisher and Brown eventually have plenty of company as commercial divers in the Hall of Fame. The organization provides scholarships and training grants to young women in a variety of diving disciplines each year. Thirteen women divers

Tamara Brown, President of Divers Academy International and Association of Commercial Tamara Brown, President of Divers Academy International and Association of Commercial Diving Educators.d

received scholarships and grants at the Women Divers Hall of Fame’s annual meeting in March.

“We keep seeing an increase in the number of women who are applying for these scholarship and training grants,” Scholley said, “and we’re also seeing a really significant increase in the talent that these young women are bringing into the diving industry. A lot of us have been successful in our careers, and we want to give back and nurture the next generation of women divers so we continue doing all this good stuff in the underwater world.

“When you look at our book, our commercial-diving section is still pretty small when it comes to actually working in the commercial world, but then you also look at all the others who kind of support the commercial world, like the divingequipment areas. Some of the women have taken on divingequipment companies and are now running them. That’s pretty impressive as well.”