Wanting to go deeper, my buddies and I ordered what we were told was the first tank and regulator to be shipped to Honolulu. After picking it up in a crate from the sporting-goods store, we rushed back to an aircraft maintenance hangar, where we pumped two hundred pounds of stale air from a compressor into the tank. Then we took turns diving off a reef in twenty feet of water. Those were the days before scuba certification by qualified instructors, and it was a wonder we didn't suffer any number of diving maladies. Air embolisms and decompression times were vague terms and were not considered by most sport divers in 1951.

Upon returning to civilian life, I tried college again, but found that nothing had changed. The same musty classroom smell still nauseated me and, besides that, I had no thought of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Drawn back to the smell of oil and gasoline, my old school chum, Dick Klein, and I bought a gas station just off the San Bemardino Freeway six miles outside Los Angeles, and we operated it for almost four years.

On weekends, Dick and I used to travel around the deserts of Southern California in an old 1948 Mercury convertible that we stripped before installing oversized truck tires on the wheels. A shame. In pristine condition today that car would be worth the price of a new one.

We searched for lost gold mines, lost ghost towns, and any sign of an artifact that looked as if it had been forgotten by old prospectors or the early Spanish explorers. Success usually eluded us, but we did have a great time shooting antique rifles at rocks in the distance.

I finally became a certified diver after quitting a highfalutin advertising job in Hollywood to work as a clerk with a small chain of dive shops in Orange County. There was a method to my madness, however, as I had decided to write sea stories, and what better place to launch my career as a writer than from behind the counter of a dive shop? Don Spencer, Ron Merker, and Omar Wood, legendary divers and owners of the Aquatic Center dive stores, wondered which part of the moon I'd dropped from when I applied for a job that paid $400 a month after making $2,000 a month as creative director for a national advertising agency. But shrewd and canny guys that they were-Spencer has since passed on-they put aside their doubts and hired me. They became good friends and I've always owed them all a great debt of gratitude. I fondly recall when Merker certified me with a Los Angeles County card. He wasn't awfully impressed with my diving abilities even after I reminded him that the Red Baron, Manfred Von Richthofen, who

shot down eighty Allied planes in World War I, had nearly flunked out of flight school.