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Profile posted by Gene’s sister 3.25.17:
Gene excelled in science and math, was president of the Science Club, on the honor roll for 4 years, and graduated with an Honor Roll Society scholarship to the University of New Mexico in Las Cruces where he majored in mechanical engineering and minored in math and metallurgy. He was an experienced telescope maker and optics expert so he was hired at White Sands Rocket Proving Grounds, and worked there while going to college. But he was an adventure seeker, so when he grew bored of desk work as an engineer, he joined the Marines and ended up as the Marine-base Beach Master In Okinawa for 4 years where he taught SCUBA diving for military operations, then later on got seriously into industrial deep-sea saturation-diving for oil companies—as his chosen career to make money.
He traveled the world running crews of divers for oil companies, welding underwater, and laying electrical lines on the sea floor. As the supervisor on various huge diving rigs, and the most experienced diver, he always did the most dangerous dives himself, such as hard-hat diving to 220 feet on compressed air, 300 feet on compressed helios gas, and bell-diving to depths of 600 feet in the North Sea, thus has a track record of never losing a crew man in his 40 years of commercial diving. Saturation diving requires hours, sometime days, of decompression. He practiced his guitar and wrote poetry and read books while in the decompression chamber, never wasting a moment.
Now retired @81 he designs, builds, & tests diving helmets, rides motorcycles, swims every day in his pool, & has two grand kids by his son (a boy and a girl). He’s in excellent health with a sinewy physique, deep voice, and witty sense of curmudgeonly humor to hide his soft and kind interior.
He has impeccable character, is honest to a fault, loyal, and generous, but nobody’s fool. He says he has no fear of anything but boredom, so when he’s “resting” he reads voraciously.
He has written 5 books of poetry and ballads about his exploits all over the world: Verse and Perverse, Nothing Sacred, Cock and Bull, Rainy Day Rhymes, In Deep Water/Songs of the Sea. His prose/poetry is fun and exciting to read because it’s not only non-fiction story-telling at its finest but philosophical, satirical , and humorous, often with a punch-line moral at the end. He has also transcribed 3 bio-books originally written by close relatives, for posterity, and he distributed them to family members.
Update in 2019: Gene has just published his unique autobiography titled "Saltwater Nomad", about his adventurous life, including his younger years as a deep sea diver. It is the first in a series of three (a trilogy). He's busy working on book 2 which is exclusively about the technical but dangerous world of professional deep sea diving. Book 3 will be about his later years. What is truly amazing is he has lived to tell us about it! And what a story it is! If you'd like a copy just put down your request on Gene's message page.
I am Gene’s younger sister (class of ‘60). I have always greatly admired both of my brothers, and not without reason. Leonard (class of ‘55) and Gene (class of ‘54) both excelled at everything they did, and if they were perceived as nerds in high school, (straight A students), they were anything BUT. Gene turned out to be the bravest, most daring, intelligent, & multi-talented manly man I have ever known.
He is an artist, cartoonist, mechanic, craftsman builder, deep sea diver, mountain climber, inventor, astronomer, telescope maker, musician (guitarist and violinist), poet, writer, sculptor, scientist (chemist/physicist), mathematician, engineer, walking encyclopedia, and many more qualities too numerous to list here. In my opinion, Charles Bronson and Sean Connery don't hold a candle to the likes of Gene.
He’s modest and humble and would never write his OWN profile, so I am singing his praises, but with no exaggeration. I may get in trouble with him for posting this (a brotherly groan), but I’m willing to take the chance. He deserves to be “exposed”. You can read a little more about Gene in an article I wrote for BWH magazine:
http://dorothyainsworth.com/go/kart.shtml
Gene once said: “There are old divers and there are bold divers, but there aren’t any old bold divers." Well, I know at least ONE. I asked him recently how he survived such a risky career for 40 years, and his droll curmudgeonly reply was: "If you have a dangerous job, it's very unprofessional to get killed."
That's Gene.....
Contributed by Dorothy Ainsworth, 74
