Dottie Fraser, a rare woman in the world of freediving and scuba diving on the male-dominated West Coast in the 1940s and 50s, who is often credited as the first woman to be certified as a scuba instructor in the United States, died February 8 at her home in Long Beach, California. She was 99 years old.
Her death was announced by her husband Cyril May.
Miss Frazier has spent most of her adventurous life in the water, making her first dives as a child in Southern California. She seemed to have as many stories about diving as she did diving.
There was a time when she came face to face with a shark in the waters off the coast of Mexico. One day, a large seal wanted to take a fish she was bringing back to her boat and crashed into her, breaking four ribs. When she broke her leg skiing and made herself a special wetsuit with a zipper from ankle to chest so that she could roll into it and thus continue to dive with a broken limb.
Even motherhood did not stop her from spending long hours in the water.
“A friend of mine had a flag that she waved when she needed me to get back to shore to breastfeed my youngest son,” she said in an interview for Tim Ecott’s Neutral Buoyancy: Adventures in a Liquid World ( 2001).
Ms. Fraser was already an accomplished freediver and scuba diver when she began scuba diving in the early 1950s, when scuba equipment first became available in the United States. She was initially unimpressed with the outfit.
“I thought it was for sissies,” she told Neutral Buoyancy. “For people who couldn’t hold their breath long enough to eat dinner.”
But she was imbued with the new technology and in 1955 tried to enroll in a diving instructor certification course in Los Angeles County, paying the required fee. She was sent a letter saying the course was for men only, but when she broke the news to friend and respected fellow diver Jim Christiansen, he asked, “Did they refund your check?”
“When I told him no, he said, ‘Just be ready; I’ll pick you up,” she said on The League of Extraordinary Divers podcast in 2016.
She received her certification and soon began teaching others to scuba dive. Her first class, a group of male doctors, refused to be taught by a woman. She convinced reluctant students to take the first part of her diving course and see what they thought of her teaching. All of them returned for the second part of the snorkeling.
“I was proud of my first class,” she wrote in her autobiography, Pioneer: The Extraordinary Life of Diving Pioneer Dottie Fraser (2019), “and of my new career as the first woman to become a scuba instructor in the world. “.
Dorothy Adell Rader was born July 16, 1922 in Long Beach to Francis and Laura (Davis) Rader, who lived a block away from the Pacific Ocean. Her father owned sailboats and motor boats and started taking her on the water with him when she was just a baby.
“I managed to fall overboard at least once a day,” she wrote in her book, “but my dad said that I did it on purpose whenever he said, “No, you can’t go into the water.”
After her parents divorced when she was 3, she lived with her father on a 28-foot skiff for several years. Her grandparents and aunts also helped raise her.
“I never knew who would look after me next,” she wrote. “I think that’s one of the reasons I became so independent at an early age.”
She often told the story of how her father talked her into diving seriously. When she was 6 years old and anchored off Catalina Island with him, he called her to retrieve the coffee pot, which he dropped 15 feet deep while cleaning it. (He claimed he couldn’t do it himself because he had a bad cold.) She was already a capable swimmer, but didn’t venture to that depth. With the support of her father, she dived and found a pot.
“Shortly after that dive, I was diving to depths I couldn’t believe, collecting shells and rescuing things,” she told the League of Extraordinary Divers. “And then my dad gave me some copies.”
Her father gave her a makeshift mask and fins, and she learned to spearfish and dive for lobster and abalone, often catching lunch and occasionally taking orders from the locals. People also hired her to recover purses and other things that they had dropped into the sea.
She graduated from Long Beach Polytechnic High School in 1939 and spent a year at a secretarial college. She married Don Gat in 1940 and they had two sons, Darrell and Donald. During World War II, she worked for Douglas Aircraft. She and Mr Gat divorced after the war.
She married Jake Fraser in 1951 and had two more sons, David and Daniel; this marriage also ended in divorce. She married Mr May in 1973. He survived her along with her sons David, Daniel and Donald and seven grandchildren.
In addition to her work as a scuba diving instructor, Ms. Fraser, a member of the Women’s Diver Hall of Fame, ran Penguin’s dive shop in Long Beach for 15 years beginning in the 1950s, and also designed and sold wetsuits and drysuits. She also learned to dive with a helmet—the one used in underwater commercial work—but didn’t pursue career opportunities because, at about five feet tall and weighing no more than 100 pounds, she found the equipment too bulky and restrictive.
She was energetic and adventurous even in her 90s. At 93, she went on a zipline. In 2019, she finally sold the last of her motorcycles. In an interview with Neutral Buoyancy, she noted that longevity seems to be related to diving.
“Many real divers have lived to a ripe old age,” she said. “Being underwater affects your spirit.”