The coffee pot tumbled into the crystalline water and sank to a depth of 15ft. Francis Reider, who had dropped the container while rinsing it, peered over the side of his boat and suggested to his daughter, Dottie, that she dive down and recover it.
It was a challenging task for a six-year-old, but Dottie was game and soon her father was once again enjoying his caffeine fix on their boat anchored off Catalina Island, 22 miles from the coast of southern California.
The girl was hooked and before long she was collecting shells and grabbing abalone and lobster as she embarked on an underwater life that saw her become an experienced free diver and the first certified female scuba instructor in the United States.
Few women were scuba divers in 1955 and her application for the training course was rejected by the Los Angeles authorities. She turned up anyway. “There was considerable mumbling and grumbling from the other students, all males,” Frazier recalled. Still, encouraged by a male friend, she persisted and graduated with top marks.
Teaching was no less fraught. She advertised her services via a dive shop as “D Frazier” and eight doctors signed up for her first class, requesting that it take place in a pool at one of their homes. “After I rang the doorbell at the address that I was given, the door was opened by a very nice-looking man who politely asked, ‘Well, what can I do for you, young lady?’,” she wrote in her 2019 autobiography, Trailblazer.
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“I answered, ‘I am here to teach a scuba class.’ ‘Oh no, I’m sure there must be a big mistake. I’m sure the others in the class would agree that we wouldn’t take lessons from a woman’.” She asked them to give her a chance. The men conferred for 30 minutes before agreeing, and Frazier went on to train more than 2,000 scuba divers.
Dorothy Adell Reider was born in Long Beach, California, in 1922. Her parents, Francis and Laura (née Davis), divorced when she was three and she lived on a sailboat in the summers with her father, a property developer and keen sailor who raised her as a tomboy.
The young Dottie was an object of local curiosity when out skating, cycling or swimming, since she often had her 6ft pet snake, Buddy, wrapped around her neck. She added five more serpents and a tarantula named Terry to her collection, and bred rats and mice to feed the reptiles. Standing 5ft 2in, and weighing under eight stone, she honed her spear-fishing skills, even impaling fish that were bigger than her.
Frazier became a skin diving instructor in 1940. Two years later she qualified as an aircraft mechanic and worked at a Douglas Aircraft factory to aid the war effort. She was the only woman in her 40-strong department. Though she spent a year at secretarial college, a desk job was never likely to appeal.
A fishing-boat skipper who was a friend of her father was desperate for a new deckhand but worried that it was bad luck to bring a woman aboard. When they met she wore bulky clothes and a hat to obscure her figure and hair and he agreed to give her the position. The crew hunted for sharks off the coast of Mexico to harpoon and gut them, canning the livers for use in medicines. One of the razor-toothed predators almost made a meal of her on a diving trip to Baja California. She was spear-fishing away from the boat when she noticed a great white shark circling the craft. It noticed her, too, and swam straight at her. In desperation, she did the same, charging towards its mouth. The startled shark took evasive action and she reached the boat, sobbing and shaking back on deck.
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Frazier later ran a diving shop, made rubber suits for US navy divers, worked as a commercial diver for towboat and barge businesses and managed her father’s properties. She married Don Gath, who worked in a petrol station, in 1940. He joined the Marines and was gravely injured by a mortar shell at Iwo Jima. The union ended in divorce, as did a second marriage, in 1951, to Jake Frazier. She met Cyril May, an Australian musician, while surfing in Mexico. They married in 1973. He survives her along with a son from her first marriage, Donald, who worked in the aircraft industry, and two retired sons from her second, David, who was a police officer, and Daniel, a fire department captain. Another son from her first marriage, Darrell, also a police officer, predeceased her.
Frazier was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in 2000. Still living in the same house, a block from the ocean, that she purchased in 1940, she excelled in senior-level racquetball and billiards tournaments and went zip-lining in her mid-nineties. She joined a motorcycle club, selling her last bike in 2019 when the state government refused to renew her licence.
A seal once shattered two of her ribs and knocked her unconscious while trying to steal her catch, she broke a leg in a skiing accident, and endured injuries that required surgeries on her knee, hand and shoulder. Sexism also hurt.
While diving to a depth of 120ft to explore a Second World War bomber that had crashed into the Pacific Ocean on a training flight, Frazier spent too long underwater when her watch broke and suffered from the bends after her ascent. “I ended up at the hospital and haemorrhaged. My hands were totally numb. You could prick me with a pin and I couldn’t feel anything. They thought I was going to die,” she remembered.
Yet medical staff at a military facility refused to let her use their hyperbaric chamber. “They said it was all in my mind, I was a girl, and girls don’t get the bends,” Frazier recalled. It took two years for her body to return to normal. “The doctor said that my recovery was pure luck.”
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Spirit was surely a factor. “I was a female in a man’s world for just about everything I did,” Frazier told the League of Extraordinary Divers podcast in 2016. “And I’m a fighter.”
Dottie Frazier, diver, was born on July 16, 1922. She died at her home on February 8, 2022, aged 99