CBS Chicago Vault: New Year's Day diving in a frigid Lake Michigan with Bob Wallace
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Every New Year's Day as sure as noisemakers at midnight, the Polar Plunge makes the news in the Chicago area and beyond.
The Polar Plunge has been around for a long time. But back in the 1970s and 80s, a Chicago diving club had a different take on the general idea. They didn't race into the water in Speedos and swim caps—they put on dry suits or wet suits, donned scuba tanks, and submerged themselves in the icy waters of Lake Michigan, no matter what the weather on New Year's Day.
And in what became a New Year's Day tradition for a while, the late reporter Bob Wallace used to go on that frigid dive too. For Channel 2 News.
The 20 Fathom Club practiced at the old Lawson YMCA on Chicago Avenue, and took open water diving trips everywhere from Lake Michigan to the Caribbean. The late CBS Chicago sound man and video editor Bob Gadbois, and cameraman Jim Mulqueeny, were both members. In the interest of full disclosure, the parents of the author of this digital story were also members of the 20 Fathom Club, but they never took part in the icy New Year's Day dives.
Wallace, however, did so numerous times—the first of which was on Jan. 1, 1981. The dive always took place just south of Navy Pier, and on that particular New Year's Day, the video shows overcast skies, but no snow coming down.
The water had turned murky from recent storms that New Year's Day. Yet Wallace said divers were cavorting in the water "like bunch of playful seals."
"I tell you, we practice here so that we can dive in places like Jamaica—and all those exotic places," the late LeRoy Winbush, then president of the 20 Fathom Club, told Wallace that day.
Wallace didn't put on any scuba tanks, but he wore a wet suit, fins, goggles, and a snorkel as he lowed himself into the water. He said after a while, it was "kind of fund, just like a summer's day… in Antarctica."
A year later to the day, Wallace returned for another New Year's Day dive with the 20 Fathom Club on Jan. 1, 1982. Conditions were sunny that day, yet weather records indicate the highs were in the 20s. Wallace again put on a wet suit, and found the rocks just below the surface of the lake a challenge when trying to walk around.
But the event was growing by 1982—with about 20 divers out that New Year's Day compared with 10 the year before. Some of the divers called it a perfect hangover cure for anyone who might have overdone it a bit on New Year's Eve.
There is video in the CBS Chicago archive of the 20 Fathom Club dive on New Year's Day 1983, which fell on a Saturday, but Wallace seems not to have joined them that year. Wallace did, however, return a year after that on Jan. 1, 1984—a day on which the video makes clear the weather was quite miserable.
Snow was coming down on New Year's Day 1984, and the water in Lake Michigan was covered by ice. So the divers—and Wallace—had to go out a ways and find a hole in the ice at the end of the breakwater south of Navy Pier.
This kind of weather required some extra safety measures. The regulators for the divers' scuba tanks were freezing up, resulting in a hiss of compressed air. A little hot water solved that problem—at least temporarily.
Also, Wallace accidentally broke off the ice floe the divers were all holding onto—making the diving hole even bigger.
But every time, a grand—if chilly—time was had by all.
