Diving Deep into Adventure
You’ve seen it happen in countless adventure movies. A crew of specialists come together and travel the globe in pursuit of hidden truths or buried treasure. It might seem like complete fiction, but one conversation with Harry Truitt ’70 is enough to know that these adventures are real!
For over 50 years, Truitt has been scuba diving and exploring the underwater world. This passion was ignited by the rising popularity of TV programs like Sea Hunt and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau in the 1950s and ’60s. While a sophomore at Bradley, his interest was spurred when he answered a newspaper ad to put together a diving class.“The guy bailed on me last minute after I already got students signed up!” Truitt recalled. Against the odds, he found another diving instructor to carry out the class successfully. Truitt helped teach several more diving courses throughout his college years and eventually became a certified instructor himself.
Truitt’s military focus may have been in the skies as part of the ROTC Air Force program, but his love for the sea flourished when he was assigned to McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Wash. after graduation. Here, Truitt continued to teach diving courses to others at the base and he even began doing his own underwater photography with Joe Liburdi. “We got pretty famous in the Northwest as underwater photographers,” Truitt said. “We even published our own guidebook called A Guide to Our Underwater World.”
This sub-aquatic friendship eventually grew into Truitt and Liburdi opening a business together called Lighthouse Diving Center. “We started as the typical dive shop, but eventually we started meeting people from the diving world and working with larger companies like Boeing,” Truitt said. Making these connections and building a reputation through Lighthouse Diving opened the way for Truitt’s many remarkable adventures that sound right out of a Hollywood script!
He has traveled the world to dive with sharks, search for shipwrecked treasures and even retrace the biblical story of Moses crossing the Red Sea. “Going to Egypt was a fascinating but covert expedition,” Truitt chuckled, “and our theory that came from this has become more widely accepted as time goes on.” Incredible voyages like this have left him with countless stories of crossing paths with names like actor Jack Lemmon, Apollo 14 astronaut Jim Irwin and even his diving hero Jacques Cousteau.
Truitt has always remembered his Bradley roots throughout his captivating diving career: “I’ve had lots of expeditions, meeting interesting people but there’s another side of me besides being an underwater adventurer. There’s the business side, and I owe that to Bradley. My education is a large part of why Lighthouse Diving has stayed in business for over 50 years and it is how I have been able to live this wonderful life.”
