First, why? Why write on the early history of this club? For me, I have been associated with it for a long time. It has been like a long-time family member. Time marches on and soon the club will be 35 years old. Historical family details start fading with age. It's time to pass along the family secrets to all the young sea-pups coming along.
The first line of a reliable source of facts is the past club newsletters. At this point, I have most of the newsletters from Nov. 1967 to present. I am working on trying to get earlier material. From these, membership rosters, officer names, club events, and a historical perspective can be developed. The second line of research are past membership cards, instructor cards, and club instructor manuals. Officer positions, instructor names, dive course dates and instructional material can then be gathered from these documents.
Our memories are a third source of information. From the memories, contact with past members will reveal more facts of the past. The transcript of the 25th reunion of the University Underwater Society illustrates how tricky it is to work with memory. When a person says they held an office in a certain year, was it only that year or did the office span between two years? Most officers in the early years were elected at the end of one year, took office the next year and ended their office early the following year. If you will look at the transcript when I was speaking, you will see that I said I was the Assistant Safety Officer at one point. In the excitement of the moment, I had stated I held one office when it was really the Assistant Equipment Officer. Someone looking only at this document or hearing the tape would incorrectly conclude I had held the Assistant Equipment Officer position. I was astonished at my blunder when I made the transcript this year. When memories can be verified with written documents and photographs, then one is closer to uncovering the real facts.
To my surprise, even written documents themselves will sometimes lead to
wrong conclusions unless one has the memories to analyze them and vice-versa.
A good example of this is the history of one of the club's name changes.
Refer to the historical part of " The Early Years" about headings on
newsletters, club names on membership and instructor cards. Many of
these items had the "wrong" official club name on them when they were used,
because existing printed supplies were used first before re-ordering new
cards with the correct name. Looking at the changing imprint of the
rubber return address stamp revealed one name change being approved in Feburary
1968 and being reflected in the changed return address in March 1968.
The name change at this point went from University of Texas Underwater
Society (UTUS ) to University Underwater Society ( UUS ). In the 1968
name change, it took memories, documents, and analysis to piece together
an accurate chronology of events.
The hardest part of this history is to reconstruct the first two to three years of the club's existence. Interviews with early members will reveal more information on the club's early history. Presently, I am contacting members that were in the club before I became a member to see if they have old newsletters or the memories to fill in the early information. Sometimes members will have slightly different memories of the same event. In this situation, the more facts supporting one memory may be deemed the more accurate memory. In other instances, the conflicts of memories are really not possible to resolve; so, all we know is that the event happened, but we cannot be sure of the exact reasons or facts behind the event.
In filling in the names of officers and dates served, I relied on club rosters and newsletters mainly. You will notice the spelling of the names may change from one year to the next in the officer list. Unless I knew for certain a name was spelled a certain way, I copied the spelling as I found it in the rosters. If a name was misspelled in the club roster, its misspelling will probably be duplicated in my historical officer list. Attention to detail was required to develope the officer list. Sometimes officers were elected but did not serve, or served partial terms and another person filled out their term. Scanning every newsletter for clues on current officers was required to pick up a new change.
Knowledge of the election dates as verified by newsletters, helped me project backwards one year. Elections between 1967 and the Fall of 1970 happened in December. The new officers would take office in February of the following year and serve the Spring and Fall semesters. Those that were around for summer or who were elected specifically for summer would serve the Summer semester. In those years, generally someone would not run for office if they could not serve for one year, unless they had held an office from a previous term and no one was able to run for that office. Membership cards where officers had signed them helped fill in missing information. However, the years 1964-66 has many missing information blanks to be filled in. If I was uncertain about any position, I would leave it blank. Perhaps some older members will contact me to help fill in these missing blanks.
Many thanks to all those dear members who helped fill in the missing information.
Credit will be ultimately given to all once this project gets close
to being wrapped up. If you notice something that needs filling in
that you know about or some error that needs correction, drop me a note.
Even after the initial publication of this historical review of the
early years , please contact me about those gaps in officer information or
club historical information. I will update the history as time goes
along.
I encourage all to copy these files and make hard copies of them. This is probably the clearest our diving past is going to be.
Sincerely,
Paul Johnston
August 23, 1998
If you would like to drop Paul a note, click below:
University Scuba Club - The Early Years
© Copyright 1998 Paul Johnston