Matt's Memories, Part 2: SCUBA Diving
SCUBA DIVING MEMORIES
Again, more memories from my cousin Matt. And like his car memories, I have edited his text only slightly and added my own comments in italics.
We frequently dove on the wreck of the Niagara. Pat Delaney (a friend of our dads’) was the one who originally found the wreck of the Niagara (1856), and he recovered the ship’s safe. He would never say what it contained. Since the ship was bringing settlers to what was then Fort Dearborn (Chicago had not been named yet) we suspected it was a lot of gold and silver money. Here is a video of the wreck made in recent times.
I remember one trip we
took to a dive wreck in the summer of 1970 or so in mid-summer. We would
launch boats at Port Washington, Wisconsin. Then we would travel about 7 miles
north. This particular day was warm and sunny, and the lake was very
calm, with smooth water, but there was also a dense fog hanging low over the
lake. We decided to head to wreck site anyway, even with the heavy fog,
hoping it would clear. Dave was in his boat with Christopher and
possibly someone else; I don’t remember who, and we headed to the wreck
site. By the time we got to the wreck area, the fog was actually worse,
and it was a bit spooky, even in daylight.
Normally we would line
up on a compass heading from a smoke stack at a stone quarry that was on shore
and take a compass heading to look for the wreck, and then use depth
sounders/fish finders to look for the wreck. We had been to this wreck
many times before, but on this occasion, we had searched for hours and not been
able to locate it. This was long before GPS, so it was not always easy to
find wrecks even though we had been to them before. When we got to the location
of the smokestack, Dave took a compass heading, then set off to the approximate
location of the wreck. We would normally drop a weight with a string
attached to a bleach bottle as a floating marker and then search around it.
On this day, as it turned out, Dave had dropped his initial marker
so that the weight actually landed on the paddle wheel of the wreck-- a perfect
bullseye. As soon as we sounded, we knew we were on the wreck
location and our first dives confirmed that the marker weight had been
perfectly placed.
Monrovia wreck video
The Monrovia is a wreck that sank in Lake
Huron in May of 1959. It is a wreck that I never dove, but it is worth
noting because it was first found by Dick Race who was good friends with
Dave. In late 1970’s the Explorers Dive Club that my dad belonged to had
a Christmas party and invited John Steele, a long time wreck diver in the Great
Lakes, to come and show some of his underwater films. Dave happened to be
at that party, and John showed some film footage shot by Dick Race in 1959 of
when they first found and dove on the Monrovia.
Dave happened to be a diver shown in that film, and he said “Hey, that’s me!” when
the film ran.
You may remember a
silver whistle that had an oval shape flange on it. I know for sure that
Dave still had it while you were living in the house in Algonquin because I saw
it there. He had described finding it. This whistle came from the voice
tube on the bridge of the Monrovia,
and when someone in the engine room blew through the voice tube, the little
flapper on that whistle would move and it would make loud sound, alerting the
bridge to a voice message from the engine room and vice versa.
(K’s note:
yes! All three of us kids loved
this whistle. It was loud, and clear and
high—super fun to blow. It was large,
too, much larger than a teacher or coach’s whistle. It was round and hollow, like a wide tube that
would fit in a grown person’s hand when they wrapped their fingers around it,
and the flange that Matt mentions was like a silver collar or wide rim around
one end of the whistle. It was way
cool. Makes me wonder if Patti has it,
since she is the one who stayed to clean out the house after Dad died. It’s a
really nostalgic piece, and no doubt the three of us would fight over it!)
I have tried to
contact some people I know who might be able to get a line on who might still
have that film but have had no success so far. John Steele has passed
away, and Paul Ehorn is about the only person I know from that era who is still
around. I sent him an email but have not heard back. In the video
below, Paul appears at 19:27 as sleeping, and it must be old footage because he
has aged a lot since then.
Some names/people I
know that are in this video:
John Steele on a boat
named the RV H Hunter, Pat Delaney, Paul
Ehorn at 19:27 (sleeping), Dick Race with a boat named Neptune, and Betsy Riley.
At 19:56, a side
placard off the SS Milwaukee car
ferry, which John Steele found in late 1976 –‘77 or so. We dove that wreck
a year after it was found. It was a long lost mystery ship—a very big,
steel-hulled ship that disappeared in a bad storm with no survivors. It
was a big surprise that when Steele found the wreck, it was only about 3 miles
out from Milwaukee Harbor, so they had almost made it back to safety.
Steele found that when it sank, the main pilothouse had lifted off and sat on
the lake bottom next to the ship in about 115 feet-deep water. He found
the captain’s engraved gold watch lying on the floor of the pilot house.
The one time I dove
this wreck, Dave was also out there with his boat, and Dick Race was there
with his boat, the Neptune, already
anchored to the wreck. Dave tied off directly to the Neptune. We could only dive one tank without decompressing,
so we were limited to one dive of about 10 minutes or so. I don’t know if
Dave brought anything up off the wreck that day.
Lockwood Pioneer Scuba
Diving Museum – this museum seems to be associated with John Steele, but I have
not found a way to contact them to look for a copy of the Dick Race film that
includes Dave.
SS Milwaukee wreck
Prinz Wilhelm wreck at 7:50, mid-ship main cabin structure. We still have the porthole from off the stern
cabin, and we also used to have the skylights with portholes off of the stern
cabin, but Mom had put it in the garage, and I don’t know what happened to
it.
We dove this wreck
quite a lot. I don’t recall what Dave may have brought up, but he was not
diving as much by the late 1977, ’78, ‘79 timeframe.
(K's note: yeah..... this
porthole was a thing of admiration. My uncle had it hanging on the wall
of their living room all the years that I can remember. I loved it! It's
one of those things that symbolized why I admired my uncle, topped with it
being one of the things he did together with my dad, which made it all the more
special.)
A Northerner wreck off
Port Washington was being towed as a cargo barge when it sank. We never
dove this wreck, but there are some great underwater images. This video
shows far better water conditions than when we were diving the lake.
Water clarity used to be that good—as good as in the video-- very far north in
the Door County Wisconsin area, but it’s pretty murky in rest of lake.
Zebra mussels, which invaded the lake, have drastically changed the water
clarity for the worse.
A FEW OTHER MEMORIES ABOUT HOUSES
When I was still
pretty young-- just a few years old-- I remember that Dave and Christine bought
a large, gray 2 story house somewhere in Oak Park. It was a neat old
house and I think it was their first house. I remember Christopher
being a baby in that house, maybe up to being a toddler. Your parents
sold it for some reason; I think to buy a 2 flat building in Cicero/Berwyn,
which I think was their next home. It was a nice building, but your family
was there only a few years, and I think during this time we moved from our
house in Oak Park to Elgin, as my Dad got transferred to a Simpson Electric
plant out there. Our first place in Elgin was an apartment where we
stayed for a year or so. Patti may have been born while your parents
lived in the Berwyn duplex because I remember that one Christmas they came to
visit for the holiday and Patti was just almost a toddler. In fact, I had
a toy car of a Pontiac Bonneville that had a maroon body and a black top.
She was interested in the toy and took her first steps to come to me and take
the toy to play with.
I also remember that
you lived in a 2nd floor apartment on the West Side of Chicago for some time,
but I do not remember address. I just remember that it had roaches, and that drove
your mom nuts before you moved from there to the newly built DesPlaines house,
and she did not want to bring bugs along when you moved. Des Plaines was a
split-level house near O’Hare’s Airport’s flight path.
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