And Dottie could tell a tale about each and every treasured memory: where she took that prize-winning fish, when she was given the ship’s bell, who she was surfing or diving with on the Mexico trip, and what motorcycle she rode on the desert trip.
Dottie passed away February 8, 2022, at her Long Beach, Calif. home, at age 99. She lived in her home for more than 80 years, purchasing it in the early 1940s with money made working on commercial fishing boats.
In her mid-90s Dottie started giving some thought to her collections, type-written tales (with carbon copies!) and other memorabilia. A book, she reasoned, would help secure her legacy as a diving pioneer and female trailblazer. Additionally, it would serve to organize and digitize her collections of images, scrapbooks and stories.
That’s when friends offered to help. “Dottie was concerned that after she passed away, her family would not know what to do with all of her scrapbooks, photos and stories,” recalls Bonnie Toth, one of Dottie’s sea sisters in the Women’s Divers Hall of Fame. (Dottie was inducted into WDHOF in 2000.)
Bonnie, always busy with graphic design projects for clients up and down the SoCal coast, stopped by Dottie’s as often as possible when in the Long Beach area. “I had been over there visiting and we got to talking. I told her I could design her book, but we would need someone to edit the stories.” That’s how Karen Straus, another WDHOF sea sister, became involved as the book’s editor.
Birth of a Book
But how is a self-published book like Trailblazer: The Extraordinary Life of Diving Pioneer Dottie Frazier actually born? How do boxes and boxes of papers and stacks and stacks of photo albums, collected over a long lifetime, become a professionally designed, edited and published book?
In Trailblazer’s case, the process was made easier by our collaboration with Dottie, a born storyteller, journal-keeper, poet, scrapbooker and collector. And she knew exactly what she wanted: for her voice to be authentic.
Dottie had already been contacted by another writer before Trailblazer was hatched, recalls Bonnie. “She was approached originally by an author in England who wanted to do a children’s book, which she had done previously for another well-known woman. But when she sent a first draft, Dottie responded by saying that the character did not sound at all like her, it made her sound like a girly-girl.”
At just 5 feet tall and 100 pounds, blonde and vivacious, you might easily mistake Dottie for a “girly-girl.” But that would be your first mistake, as Dottie would no doubt be delighted to inform you. Yes, she had modeling assignments and appeared in a film or two, but in the 1940s she was also a competitive spearfisher in a male-dominated sport, a founding member of the Long Beach Neptunes Spearfishing Club in 1950, a commercial fisher, an avid snow- and water-skier, surfer, hunter and motorcyclist. Later in life she was won Senior Olympics sports medals for racquetball and billiards. And don’t forget ziplining. Up to the age of 95 she celebrated birthdays with a zipline ride.
Most importantly, Dottie was an educator. From swimming instruction at the Long Beach Pike Plunge pool and YMCA skin diving classes in the 40s, to teaching all levels of Red Cross water safety programs, from small craft to lifesaving to first aid, up into the 1970s.
Most famously, she became the first woman in the US certified as a scuba instructor. She blazed this trail in 1955 when she applied for the Los Angeles County Underwater Instructors Course, 4 UICC. Having mailed in her application and course fee, she received in return a letter saying that the class was for men only. A male diving friend registered for the class told Dottie to show up anyway, because they had not returned her check. He drove Dottie to the class, coaching her on scuba physics along the way. Dottie took her seat in the classroom and the rest was history. She graduated second in the class and was asked to develop programs for female divers. She was also offered a seat on the Los Angeles County Underwater Unit board of directors, serving from 1956 to 1973. Over a 20-year period she taught scuba to hundreds of people.
Dottie was also the first woman to own and operate a dive shop, Penguin Dive Shop in Long Beach, and the first woman to manufacture wetsuits, not only for her own label, Penguin, but also for other manufacturers and the military.
1954. Dottie in the water. (Photo courtesy of the Frazier family)
Freeway Flyers
But back to the book. With the editor in San Diego, the designer in San Clemente and Dottie in Long Beach, freeway flying to meet at her home was the next step. We met many times with her to record interviews, take notes, to photograph her and the artifacts, and to sort through and to digitally archive photographs and printed materials.
We also took boxes and boxes away to our homes, Bonnie the photographs and documents and me the typed stories. At our homes we did more processing and cataloging, digitally securing important art and papers for future use, before returning the materials in their boxes to Dottie. Bonnie scanned more than 500 photos, newspaper clippings, certificates, awards, etc., from Dottie’s scrapbooks.