Underwater thoughts - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 5

I would end up cleaning fish tanks for the rest of my life. Years later, I
had to laugh. Having earned a master's degree from the University of
California at Los Angeles (UCLA), I found myself doing just that: clean-
ing fish tanks along with my other tasks at Marineland of the Pacific.
At age seventeen I graduated from the Friends' School and was now
subject to the military draft. Fortunately, I had both American and
British citizenship, so I signed up as a mess boy on an American freighter
returning to the States in convoy, under nightly attack by German U-
boats from Liverpool to New York. I spent the remainder of World
War II on Liberty ships in the Pacific ferrying war supplies to the bat-
tle zones of Guadalcanal, New Guinea, and the Philippines. When the
war ended, I served as a medical technician in the U.S. Army for a year
and a half on Okinawa.
This military service qualified me to take advantage of the G.I. Bill's
free education for service personnel. I enrolled at UCLA, finally able
to focus on my dream. Although the U.S. government covered school
fees and topics, I had to pay my own living expenses. I therefore took
on a wide variety of part-time jobs: I worked the night desk at a Sun-
set Boulevard motel and the graveyard shift at a gas station; I served
as night attendant in the psychiatric ward of the Veterans Hospital—
a very disturbing job—and maintained the live Maine lobster holding
facility at a Malibu restaurant. For two summers I worked as a sea-
sonal aide for the California Department of Fish and Game catching,
measuring, tagging, and releasing yellowtail from sportfishing boats out
of Long Beach and San Pedro harbors. It was great work, but it also
gave me a taste of the bureaucracy in a government agency.
DESCENT INTO A NEW WORLD
I can blame Jacques Cousteau for nudging me in the direction that
was to become my life. A friend gave me a copy of Cousteau's first topic,
The Silent World. I was so fascinated with his descriptions of his expe-
riences underwater that I knew I had to learn to dive. Because I was a
student and constantly short of money, though, diving was not a sim-
ple matter. I talked my younger cousin, Norman Powell, into going
halves with me on whatever equipment we needed to get started.