Interviewer(s): D. Austin. Houston, TX

Affiliation: University of Arizona

I learned about Oran, Scott, and Don during my first visit with Mary Ann Galletti. All three dove for J&J Diving, and Mary Ann agreed to get them together to talk with me on my next visit to Houston. She had originally arranged to have them over to her house for dinner, but Scott decided he would have the dinner at his house. He is a bachelor and lives in a large two-story house in Houston. When Mary Ann and I arrived, the three guys and Mary, Mary Ann's oldest daughter, were already at the house. They were drinking wine, snacking, and talking about their experiences in the diving business. They continued to chat for quite some time before Don asked me to tell them more about what I was doing so they could decide if they wanted to talk with me. I explained the study, and they agreed to go into the living room and sit around the tape recorder in a group interview. Though there is a lot of banter back and forth among the divers and the interview is less formal than most, the divers were candid in their descriptions of both the attitudes and actions of the divers and provide a sense of the relationships that existed among divers.

Oran Tarleton decided he wanted to be a diver when he was four years old and watched Sea Hunt on television. He went straight into diving school after leaving high school in 1977 and found his way to the Gulf of Mexico working for J&J Diving Services out of Pasadena, Texas. He performed both inland and offshore work and remained with J&J until it was bought by CalDive in the 1980s.