Dorothy Adell Reider Gath Frazier May. Her name is longer and weighs more than she does, standing barely five feet tall and 100 pounds dripping wet. And dripping with water is how Dottie has spent much of her remarkably adventurous and long life.
What is amazing about Dottie is not just WHAT she did, but WHEN she did it: Ocean swimming and boating as a child in the 1920s, as well as surfing, skin diving and spearfishing. In the 30s she was a skin-diving instructor. In the 1940s she was a 'Rosie the Riveter' during the war years and a commercial fisher to help feed her growing family. In 1950 she was a charter member of the famed Long Beach Neptunes dive club. And in 1955, she became the world's first certified female scuba instructor. She was also a hard-hat diver and was the first female dive shop owner and wetsuit manufacturer.
Dottie tells her extraordinary life story in her own words, bringing to life her early childhood in Long Beach, California, where she was raised as the son her father never had, to being honored in 2019, at the age of 97, with the Historical Diving Society Diving Pioneer Award.
Frazier, Dottie: - Karen Straus was born in Southern California and grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. She started diving in 1968 after taking a scuba certification course in college. She was among the first handful of women certified as scuba instructors, earning her Los Angeles County instructor certification in 1970. For many years she taught swimming, life-saving, and skin and scuba diving in Orange County, California. She also began writing about and photographing marine life for dive magazines and books. She spent the next 20 years in Montana, Maine, Chicago and New York working as a newspaper reporter and photographer, a food writer and editor, and a writer and field producer for underwater and nature television programming. Karen is a long-time officer of the San Diego Underwater Film Exhibition. She was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in 2011. In 2017 she was the co-author of Immersion: 75 Years of Adventure and Discovery, about the invention of the Aqua Lung regulator. In 2018 she was a contributor to Ocean Metaphor, Unexpected Life Lessons From the Ocean. She is a contributing editor to Dive Training magazine.
Straus, Karen: - A California native and scuba diver since 1978, Bonnie Toth is creative director and owner of Bonnie Toth Advertising & Design in San Clemente, CA. For more than 35 years, she has shared her passion and creativity elevating the marketing world through outstanding visual communications and advancing exploration of the undersea world through her deep commitment to diving and leadership in the industry. Bonnie served on the Board of Directors of the Women Divers Hall of Fame for 14 year and is currently the Graphics and Website Coordinator. Bonnie is the Managing Editor for The Journal of Diving History and was the designer of Aqua Lung's coffee table book, Immersion: 75 Years of Adventure and Discovery. Bonnie was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in 2007. In 2014, she received the Historical Diving Society E.R. Cross Award for Distinguished Service and the BTS Diver of the Year for Distinguished Service. Bonnie also received the prestigious Academy of Underwater Arts & Sciences NOGI for Distinguished Service in 2016.
