Glen Henry has taught hundreds of people how to scuba dive. That’s impressive enough but even more so considering he had never dove before putting together a plan to teach diving at the University of Northern Iowa in 1971.
“UNI had gotten federal dollars to build the Physical Education Center. Dr. (Bill) Thrall was head of the new building and knew there were monies left over. He asked the staff of about 13 at the time to come up with ideas for new classes. Being around the water and in the water program (Henry was the men’s swimming coach at the time), I thought maybe we could put in scuba. I put together a plan and a budget, and they said yes. We bought the equipment, put it in the student catalog and bingo, it filled up like crazy,” Henry said.
“I had never been near a dive tank before, so I went to the YMCA in Waterloo. They had a program over there taught by Don Edgerton. I told him what I was going to do, and he said, ‘Just get started right here by taking a class, but you’ll have to start at the bottom like everyone else’. Back then, you had to take several classes and work your way up to being an instructor. You had to be an instructor to be able to give check-outdives. I got certified in 1972.”
In 1977, Henry, along with his assistant, Cedar Falls native Roy Fielding, went to Steven’s Point, Wis. together for their open water certification. Fielding recalls one exercise required that stretched his dive buddy’s abilities.
“Our class was taught by a member of the Navy UDT (Underwater Demolition Team, the precursors to the Navy Seals). He was tough on us. One of the requirements was to go on a compass navigation course. We had to do five angles and come up within so many feet of a buoy in the water.
“In diving, you always have a buddy, so Glen and I were partners. I went first. I was 12 years younger than Glen and still was swimming a lot. I had these Super Rocket fins, and Glen had regular Rocket fins. Your partner was required to swim along above you and pull a float while you did your navigation. I remember Glen was so mad when I was done. I had worn him out trying to keep up with me. He chewed me out and said, ‘You take these Rocket fins and give me the Super Rocket ones.’”
Fielding and Henry first met when Henry was managing Ray Edwards Pool. Fielding, a self-professed pool rat, was hired as an assistant manager. He went on to swim competitively at UNI on Henry’s teams and became an assistant before moving on to the University of North Carolina-Charlotte where he still runs the scuba program today.
Between the two of them, Fielding estimates they have certified over 10,000 divers.
Henry developed a program for his students that Fielding took with him to UNC-C. “I wanted to give check-outdives if I could somewhere besides a quarry in Iowa,” explained Henry. “I had been to the Cayman Islands, and it was so delightful for diving. It’s just crystal clear, and everything was right outside our room. I thought, ‘Boy, if I could take the kids for that experience, they’d love it for the rest of their lives’.
“So I put together a little package for spring break and Christmas break. We would go down to the Caymans and stay five nights and six days. I’d give check-outdives. We started out with 15 kids. It just exploded. All of a sudden we had 30 kids. I wouldn’t take any more than that.
“At one time, we could get on a flight here in Waterloo at 6:00 in the morning. We’d be in Miami at 10:00 flying non-stop. All the kids always met in Miami and we flew together from there. An hour later we were on a plane to the Caymans, and at lunch timewe were sitting on the beach on Grand Cayman. We took probably 30 of these trips.”
Fielding’s students would join the UNI group on Grand Cayman. “There is something about sitting on a beach on New Year’s Eve that is really appealing,” he said. “Every dive in the Caymans we’d see something new. You realized instead of watching National Geographic, you were a part of it. Glen opened the students’ eyes to a bigger world than the Midwest. He’d take kids from the cornfields of Iowa to the Caribbean to dive. He would show them a different world, a different ecology and a unique experience they wouldn’t have gotten without scuba.”
Scuba became a part of some of the students’ lives. “Some students like me have made scuba a career, whether they are teaching, are dive masters somewhere or opened dive shops. They’ve made it a part of their lives,” Fielding said.
One such student was the dive master at the Divi Resort in Cayman Brac. Henry said he saw him again just a few years ago in Bonaire. “He was just a kid from a small town in Iowa.”
Henry always enjoyed the trips with students, even though keeping track of 30 18- to-20-year-olds had its challenges. “One trip, we were getting ready to leave Grand Cayman. I’m yelling at everyone, ‘Get on down here! We gottaget everything loaded’. There was this cute blond girl named Barbara. She called over the balcony and said, ‘I’m not leaving. I’m staying here’. She had found a Caymanian boyfriend who was going to find her a job if she stayed.
“I said, ‘Youknow what you’re going to do? You’re going to get your ass on that jeep right there and you’re on your way to the airport with me. I’m taking you back to Miami, Fla. because that’s exactly where I picked you up’.
“Well, she grumbled about it but got on the plane. I told her, ‘When you get off the plane in Miami, if you want to go back to the island, then you can certainly do that. And if you need to borrow the money to buy a ticket, I’ll loan it to you. But there is no way I’m leaving you here’. I took her back, and she turned right around and bought a ticket and went back.
“Two years later, I’m finishing up a scuba class at UNI at the old East Pool, and I look up in the stands and see her sitting up there all by herself. I come up and go, ‘Hey Barb! How you doing?’ and she says, ‘I’m doing great. I’m just waiting to talk to you’. We sat down after class and I asked, ‘What happened to you?’ She said, ‘Well, I went back, and he didn’t really want to settle down. I wasn’t really what he wanted, so it just didn’t work out. I got a job on a cruise line teaching snorkel with families. I’ve been with them the past several years’.
“She was from Des Moines and had come home to see her parents and told them, ‘There’s a guy in Cedar Falls I have to see’. We visited for about an hour, and I haven’t seen her since.”
When asked if he has ever been in trouble on a dive, Henry said nothing that he wasn’t able to handle.
“There was one dive with Roy, though. We were in a ship about 60 feet down. You had to work your way down and around the rooms to get to the front of the ship. It was dark in there. Roy had a light, and he had been in there several times. We got inside there and go through this port hole. I looked out and saw all these divers out there above us swimming around, and if they have any problem at all, they know how to get to the surface.
And it hit me. If I had a problem – I looked at Roy and gave him the hand signal for ‘Go back where we came from.’ He looked at me like, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I signaled again, ‘Go back!’ He looked at me again, and I gave him the finger, and he took off. We had to go through all these tunnels and so forth, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
“We got to the surface and Roy said, ‘What in the world is wrong with you?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never had anything like that in my life. I saw all those divers and started to panic and think, what if I have a problem? I cannot hold my breath long enough to get out of here. It’s too long a trip’.
“It’s because of the kids I taught that I always had to teach in a conservative way to protect the University. I always had to keep in mind that I worked for somebody and made sure that I was representing them in my best fashion. You start doing a bunch of wild things, and it’s gonna get you.”
Another of his former students, Ken Lockard, remembers a dive where Henry helped out a distressed diver. “Glen and I and another guy were diving in the Caymans the first dive of the week. We were planning to go down to about 125 feet. This guy had been telling us about all of his experience. I remember Glen and I looking at each other and knowing differently. Coach could see this guy was a rookie and took him as his dive partner right away, which later likely saved his boasting rear.
“We were down at depth and could see this guy was a weak diver and didn’t have his buoyancy correct and was always having to swim down which caused him to use up his air faster. We were just starting to enjoy the dive on a wall, and Coach’s partner is giving the sign for ‘out of air’. Coach immediately swam over at 125 feet already with his regulator out of his mouth extended in his hand to give air to the needy. Coach put his arm around him and controlled the entire situation from the assent to sharing of his regulator. We all arrived alive thanks to Coach being there.”
Henry’s favorite dive was Bloody Bay Wall in Little Cayman. “You hit the wall at 18 feet, and it drops right down to about 4,000. It’s absolutely breathtaking. It’s so still and the vegetation and the fish are beautiful. Another favorite dive is Cozumel. It’s easy diving from the standpoint that it’s drift diving. You just lay on your belly and the current carries you. You’re real close to one of the huge barrier reefs just north of Belize.”
Henry’s advice for anyone wanting to scuba? “Go for it! I would highly recommend scuba for anybody and everybody. Some of the greatest times that I had in my life were through scuba. We’ve met interesting people from all over the world because of diving. Getting involved with an activity as an adult creates situations that you would never do on your own. It gives you a purpose for living just beyond being alive. It puts a lot of zesto in your life.”
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