The Genesis of Diving
by Todd Baldi, NAUI #13386

I read a recent article about the Bottom Scratchers final membership meeting. I was privileged to have met all the surviving members of the club back in the early 1990s. It was a great memory and inspired me to write the following article.

The beginning of underwater spearfishing, photography, and sport diving began in San Diego. Freediving and scuba diving were unheard of before 1930. Yet in 1933, the first diving club in the United States (some say in the world) was organized in San Diego. The sport that now has the name of freediving was called by various names: goggle diving, skin diving, and breath-hold diving.

Three friend go together to form the Bottom Scratchers Dive Club. The idea was proposed by Glen Orr who a the time made his living by hard hat diving. He was diving commercially for abalone and seaweed. Later, Glen became the chief diver for the San Diego Port District. The three friends, Glen Orr, Jack Prodanovich, and Ben Stone had been diving to supply food for their families during the depression. By 1934 the three friends were joined by two other ocean enthusiasts, Jack Corbeley and Bill Batzloff, to form the active group of diving buddies. They were tagged the Bottom Scratchers as a joke because they were always underwater scratching the bottom of the ocean to feed families and friends. This club has become the model for clubs that have been formed all over the world.

I was fortunate enough to grow up surfing, skin diving, and scuba diving off San Diego's shoreline in the early 1970s. Once I was old enough to actually have a job, I started filling tanks at the local dive ship. Scuba had replaced skin diving in popularity, but some of the old-time spearfishermen came into the store to restock their speargun collection from time to time.

Wild stories filled the air with the "old days" when you could dive off La Jolla Cove and see lobsters and abalone fighting for space amongst the rocks. One of my favorite stories was about a guy named Miland that was a La Jolla Cove lifeguard in the 1940s and 50s. He would see a cute girl lying on the beach below the lifeguard tower and run down to ask her out to dinner. He would tell her he lived across the street from the Cove and to meet him at his place around 6 pm. She would show up and eventually ask "What was for dinner?" He would reply, "Would you like abalone, lobster, or both? She would usually reply both and he would say "Hold on a minute." He would grab a set of flippers and mask, run across the street, down the stairs, jump into the Cove while she watched and come back out five minutes later with two lobsters and an abalone. (This was before La Jolla Cove became an underwater parl.) As Miland said, "Worked every time!"

Over the years I got to know quite a few of the old timers that walked through our dive shop's doors. I was introduced to those that had a spiritual relationship with the ocean and relied more on technique than equipment to co-exist with the ocean realm. Ben Stone was one of those people.

Ben was one of the original Bottom Scratchers. He had been diving since the 1930s around La Jolla. Ben was also an avid canoe paddler. When he came in, we would always discuss his most recent canoe trips. Before long, I would eventually steer the conversation to the Bottom Scratchers. Ben would talk your ear off, and I absorbed every minute of it like a sponge.

Ben spoke of a time and place I will never know. When the ocean was unspoiled and marine life teamed off the shores. It was a time before commercial harvesting took place. Interestingly, Ben and the other Bottom Scratchers were some of the first conservationists of the ocean environment as well. They noticed that Giant Black Sea Bass were being overfished off the California coast. So they stopped hunting them and encouraged fishermen to throw them back if they were caught.

Ben would tell me about what it took to become a member of the club and the initiation rite you would need to pass to get in. A prospective member need to be able to make a free dive to 20 feet, catch three lobsters, two abalone, and a horn shark on a single breath. As he stated "Back then, it was no problem." The Bottom Scratchers got their name through this initiation rite. They would pull the horn out of the horn shark and wear it on the bathing suit as a symbol of their passing the test. The horn scraped along the bottom leaving a mark "scratching" the bottom of the sea floor, hence, the "Bottom Scratchers."

Ben was a real pleasure to speak to. A large part of that was the fact that he could actually hear you. Two other members of the club were Wally Potts and Jack Prodonovich. When these two characters walked into the dive shop. everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at them. They were the original aging rock stars of the dive scene. Potts and Prodonovich still freedove quite a bit and made spearguns for the San Diego freediving community. They usually had a number of groupies following then whenever they walked through any dive shop doors in town.

Wally and Jack were notorious for two things. One was building some of the best spearguns ever constructed on the planet. The second was for having bad hearing. The Bottom Scratchers did not know how to clear their ears when they first dove. Blown eardrums were common for these men. Early photos sometimes show a large rubber bulb attached to their mask. The thought was that this would help eqalize their ears while descending. Little was known about clearing.

Having a conversation with Wally and Jack was a very arduous task. You would need to ask every question three or four times in order for them to hear you. Frequent "whats?" and "huhs?" preceded every answer from these men. When you did finally get your answer it was well worth the wait. They both had such deep respect for the ocean, and you felt their connection with it. They spoke of battles below the sea between man and nature. For them, it wasn't about who could haul the most abalone or shoot the biggest fish, it was a kindred spirit returning home and co-exising with the ocean environment.

The Bottom Scratchers closed their membership to newcomers many years ago. Slowly, over the years, they have been passing away. I read recently that they held their last official meeting. Four members showed up. Four friends reliving old times. Like the ocean environment they love so much, they too are succumbing to a changing environment and won't be around much longer.

The Bottom Scratchers represent a throwback to the past. A time that few remember or talk about, yet their legacy still lives on. San Diego was where the initial seeds of diving paved the way for the sport as we know it today. I fondly remember those chance meetings with some of their original members and look back with a smile on my face since I was lucky enough to be a part of it.

Sources - First quarter 2008 copyright 1996 NAUI. All rights reserved.

Back to Sources main page

SEARCH