Trailblazer: The Extraordinary Life of Diving Pioneer Dottie Frazier

By Dottie Frazier and Bonnie Toth

Dorothy Adell Reider Gath Frazier May. Her name is longer and weighs more than she does, standing barely five feet tall and 100 pounds dripping wet. And dripping with water is how Dottie has spent much of her remarkably adventurous and long life.

What is amazing about Dottie is not just WHAT she did, but WHEN she did it: Ocean swimming and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bonnie Toth Advertising & Design
• Release date: Apr 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780578395067

Dottie Frazier

Karen Straus was born in Southern California and grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. She started diving in 1968 after taking a scuba certification course in college. She was among the first handful of women certified as scuba instructors, earning her Los Angeles County instructor certification in 1970. For many years she taught swimming, life-saving, and skin and scuba diving in Orange County, California. She also began writing about and photographing marine life for dive magazines and books. She spent the next 20 years in Montana, Maine, Chicago and New York working as a newspaper reporter and photographer, a food writer and editor, and a writer and field producer for underwater and nature television programming. Karen is a long-time officer of the San Diego Underwater Film Exhibition. She was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in 2011. In 2017 she was the co-author of Immersion: 75 Years of Adventure and Discovery, about the invention of the Aqua Lung regulator. In 2018 she was a contributor to Ocean Metaphor, Unexpected Life Lessons From the Ocean. She is a contributing editor to Dive Training magazine.

Book preview