Starting From Scratch : The San Diego Bottom Scratchers, a Dive Club Formed 59 Years Ago, Are Short on Members, but Long on Memories of Early Days in the Sport

SAN DIEGO —  It must have been a sight, grown men emerging from the surf in bathing suits adorned with the horns of a horn shark, wearing funny-looking goggles, carrying long wooden pitchfork-type poles--and dragging behind them loads of huge fish.

Such activity was unprecedented. This, after all, was the late 1920s. There was no such thing as skin diving. There were no wetsuits, masks, snorkels or fins. Jacques Cousteau was still a teen-ager.

People took an occasional dip in the ocean, but by and large they did not take to it as would a hunter in the field, see in it a place to spend the better part of a day exploring vast forests of kelp or probing crevices on the rocky bottom.

But that’s just what Glenn Orr, Jack Prodanovich and Ben Stone were doing.

“Every time we would get the chance,” Stone said recently from his home near Sea World. “People in overcoats, they’d say ‘Look at those . . . fools out there.’ ”

Orr, Prodanovich and Stone were charter members of the San Diego Bottom Scratchers, formed in 1933 and today the oldest dive club in the world. A requirement for membership was the capture by hand of a horn shark and the removal of its horns, which were then attached to rings on their swim trunks.

At times the horns would scratch the sandy bottom, thus the club name.

Its original charter read:

“The club does not plan to become a large one, but rather, small enough to have good control of its principals and morals:

--To be a good sportsman.

--To maintain good physical condition through year-round diving.

--To excel in diving functions and exercise the best diving habits.

--To do everything possible to prevent the waste of sea life.

--To help others appreciate the wonders of the sea.

--To commit no act that will reflect adversely on the grand sport of goggle fishing.”

That was 59 years ago. And the San Diego Bottom Scratchers lived up to such requirements and then some. Membership reached 19 and many members contributed significantly to goals set by the founders.

Most at one time or another worked in some capacity with the scientists at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla.

There was Carl Hubbs, a noted biologist and founder of the Hubbs Sea World Research Institute.

There was Lamar Boren, who became a famous underwater cinematographer, whose works include “Sea Divers” and its successful sequel “Sea Hunt,” “Flipper” and various scenes from “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Wally Potts and Stone, 78, recalled the time they were given small parts in “Sea Divers.”

“We were villains,” Stone said. Laughing and holding his belly, he added, “We were the heavies, literally.”

Potts is credited with the design of the present-day rubber-band-powered spear gun.

Prodanovich, who for 35 years was a night custodian for the San Diego School District so he could dive in the daytime, is credited with the development of the face mask.

Now 78, his hearing all but gone after countless hours in the water, he told how he grew tired of the old swimming goggles.

“The goggles made me see double,” he said.

At 27, Prodanovich took a length of radiator hose and two glass mirrors from women’s compacts, then scraped the paint from the backs of the compacts and made his own goggles.

“The difference was incredible,” he said.

Prodanovich later designed a full-face mask of copper, rubber and glass. The Japanese followed that with a rubber and glass mask.

Prodanovich also built and patented a spear tip fitted with a .38-caliber cartridge to make it easier to drive the spear into the fish. The five-prong frog-gig-fitted spear, nearly impossible to drive into the larger game fish, became a thing of the past.

The introduction of swim fins by Owen Churchill, made popular by the Bottom Scratchers, was credited largely with the growth of the pastime.

Bill Johnston, 73, who began skin diving off La Jolla in 1939, owns two dive vessels--one of them named the Bottom Scratcher--and today operates a successful diving operation out of San Diego.

“We were always successful in this underwater stuff and everybody else would see what we were doing,” Potts said. “It took hold.”

Today the Bottom Scratchers are, for the most part, an inactive group. The club stopped taking new members in 1971 and only eight are still alive. Of those, only five still live here and get together for the monthly meetings, during which they mostly reminisce.

In the early days, a popular place on weekends was Scripps Pier, where fishermen would regularly haul in huge grouper and black seabass, and bonito and barracuda by the hundreds. Huge crowds would gather to watch.

“That were before we started diving,” said Stone, a.k.a. the Porpoise, a large man whose only sign of old age is a slight hearing problem.

When the Bottom Scratchers would hit the beach with their take, the crowd would shift to the sand to watch the strangely attired divers return from the water dragging stringers of seabass, corbina and halibut, hauling sacks of lobster and abalone that would boggle the mind of today’s diver.

“There was places out there you couldn’t throw a nickel out and it wouldn’t land on an abalone,” Potts recalled. “Talk about quantities of fish, I can remember . . . I guess the biggest school I ever seen was sardines. They’re the bait fish, they’re what bring the bigger fish in. Once from (an area near Scripps Pier), I’d say a block deep toward the surf line and out, it was just black (with sardines).

“That’s what we would look for. You go out in there and the stuff’s all around you, and you wait for a hole to open up. When a hole opens up there’s gonna be something in it. It might be a seal or whatever but it’s gonna be something.”

Potts, a barrel-chested man who looks remarkably fit despite bypass surgery a few weeks ago, in 1954 speared a black seabass that weighed 401 1/2 pounds, which still ranks as the second-largest ever taken by a skin diver. Sports Illustrated ran a cover story on Potts’ experience in its fifth issue.

Potts told of the days when the ocean was more than just a world full of wonderful life. It was his source of some of the finest food available.

“It was before the deep freeze or anything like that,” Potts said. “Let’s say you had visitors come in you didn’t expect. No problem. You go down to the ocean a couple of hours and you come back with halibut or abalone--you could always get abalone.”

Years later, World War II broke out and the Bottom Scratchers were split up, but those who were sent overseas looked upon their assignments as both an opportunity to help their country and to see new parts of the world--the underwater parts.

Johnston, a tug-boat operator based in Pearl Harbor before the attack, requested and received a 24-hour-on, 24-hour-off shift, “so I was out diving every other day.”

He was befriended by the Hawaiian divers and marveled at the clarity and warmth of the water.

“I was washing my whites when the war started,” he said, laughing.

Stationed at Bishop’s Point just inside the entrance of the harbor, Johnston said the first sign of the attack he noticed was Japanese fighters chasing down a B-24 or B-17 that was coming in for a landing.

“The (Japanese planes) just chewed him up from behind him,” Johnston said. “Then we realized we were under attack.”

Stone, one of the first students to graduate from Point Loma High, was in the South Pacific in the vicinity of the Solomon Islands and Fiji during the war and recalled the time Japanese fighters caught his unit by surprise.

“I had a Browning (automatic) rifle and 20 rounds,” he said. “One came by and I shot. I wasn’t a duck hunter so I didn’t give him enough lead. The lieutenant was sitting next to me and I almost shot him in the face.”

Beau Smith, 70, told of his experience in the steamy jungles of the Solomons and Fiji.

“The only way to keep from being eaten up by fungus was to get in that saltwater,” he said. “I got there as often as I could.”

Smith, Johnston and Stone survived the war and returned to San Diego and the Bottom Scratchers resumed their diving and various club functions.

Equipment got better, thanks in part to them, and the sport of fishing and spearfishing was growing ever more popular.

Times were indeed changing, not always for the better. Pollution was becoming a problem. Fishing pressure had increased so that fish were becoming harder to come by, by Bottom Scratcher standards, anyway.

New dive clubs were springing up, charging dues and engaging in vigorous competition, which the Bottom Scratchers had always frowned upon. The Bottom Scratchers, though recognized for their many accomplishments, were being overshadowed by a new breed of skin diver.

But the remaining Bottom Scratchers don’t seem to mind.

As Potts put it: “We had it when it was the best, when it was good. I wouldn’t trade my time diving, what we did, for anything .”