Milford Granite Quarries

John Cembruch’s SCUBA Experiences

John Cyr and I had been best friends for over 25 years. We got into a lot of trouble as kids and had a few close calls as adults, after we got out of the Army in 1946. John and I got into a new trend that was sweeping the country. Scuba diving. Nick Guido from Milford (His father owned Guido’s Café on Water Street in Milford.) taught us the fundamentals of diving. A couple of years later our diving skills were fine-tuned by an ex-WWII Navyman from Beverly, Mass, who owned and operated New England Divers, one of the first companies in the U.S. to sell scuba equipment.

For five or six years, John and I dove almost every Saturday and Sunday and on any holidays that occurred during weekdays. I think we dove every quarry in New England. I believe there isn’t any body of water within 100 miles of Hopedale that we didn’t get into at least once. We knew the Milford quarries like the back of our hands. It was common belief that the quarries were full of automobiles. There weren’t any in the fifties. They started to show up in the sixties. To get an auto into a quarry, the road has to go right up to the quarry edge.

There were only two or three quarries where you could do that. In the fifties and sixties auto body parts were hard to get. There was a big demand for fairly new car parts by body shops. Two or three shops would get together and pay us good money as long as the body part was in good shape. About all the cars in the quarries belonged to the insurance companies. New autos sold (Chevy and Ford) around $1500 and up. We were selling the autos to body shops for $500 and up, depending on the condition. I was buying them from the insurance companies for $1.00. How come so cheap? We were the only ones retrieving cars from quarries in New England. If they wanted to hire us to retrieve an auto for them, I charged so much it wasn’t worth it to them to bring it up. Then I gave them my “offer they couldn’t refuse.” The auto belonging to them was their responsibility and under water they could be a hazard. Some kid could dive into the water and hit his head, or some kid could go swimming down and get entangled in the auto. They could drown or get hurt. Insurance companies do not like the idea of getting sued. They would have given the auto to us for nothing, but by law they couldn’t. They had to sell them, so they sold them to us for $1.00.

Most of the cars were more than 40 feet under water. You had to be a well-trained swimmer or diver to reach 40 feet down without an aqua-lung. The only insurance company I couldn’t con was Lloyds of London. Today there is still a 1964 Cadillac that belongs to Lloyds of London sitting on the bottom. That quarry was filled in when they built the industrial complex between Route 16 and Route 109.

John Cyr quit diving after five years and I continued to dive for another twelve. I gave diving lessons at the Woonsocket YMCA, the Worcester YMCA and the Whitinsville pool. I taught a couple of young guys I worked with to dive and we formed a small company retrieving autos out of the water. That is when we hit the mother lode. We found a quarry in Quincy that was ten times bigger than the Milford quarry. It was about the size of Hopedale Pond from the bathhouse to the dam at Freedom Street. It was around 90 feet deep and loaded with autos. We made an inventory list of what we could see. If my memory serves me, there were over 80 autos in our list, and a lot more that we couldn’t see, because they were under the ones we could see. This was the list we used to sell the autos. We did a lot of underwater work including cutting fishing nets free from lobster boat propellers in Rockport, Mass., and retrieving lobster pots for lobstermen. We did a lot of search and recovery work around the Milford area. One of the jobs I did for Drapers was in Hopedale Pond. They were getting a lot of fish into the filter to the boiler room and it was causing a big problem. They had a six-foot diameter pipe about 90 feet long going from the dam to the center of the pond, and a screen at the end to keep fish and junk from getting into it. It had been there for years and was pretty well rusted out. I did all the underwater work removing the old pipe and screen and replacing it with a new pipe and screen.

One of the strangest jobs I did was when a guy from Milford hired me to find his false teeth. He had been fishing on Louisa Lake and fell out of his boat. He couldn’t swim and almost drowned. He saved himself by hanging onto the boat, but he lost his teeth. I found them the next day. Another satisfied customer. He was still alive and went home with his teeth in his mouth.

In the fifties there wasn’t much equipment available for divers such as underwater cameras. It took me four months to build an underwater housing out of plexiglass for a 35-mm camera. I had plenty of help from several engineers at Drapers. They gave me a 4×6 sheet for plexi that cost a lot of money and cut to the sizes that I needed. I smuggled them from Drapers and fused them into a camera housing at home. There was no fast film in those days. I met a professional photographer from Medway and I taught him how to dive and he taught me how to develop film. The only underwater movie pictures you saw in those days was Cousteau, who had a couple of documentaries, and Mike Nelson of Sea Hunt, the kids’ hero on television. My friends from N.E, Divers lent me a two-hour underwater documentary film, one of the first made for that length of time. I had a showing at the Hopedale Town Hall and got quite a turnout. I was a guest speaker on several occasions. The one I’ll never forget is the night I spent with a bunch of Cub Scouts from Hopedale. Russell Dennett, my neighbor, asked me to speak to the scouts. I got the gym at the  Community House, set up a display of all the diving equipment. There were about 30 kids who attended. It started at 6:30 p.m. They filed past the display by 7 p.m. Then we started a question and answer period. The questions these kids asked me blew my mind. (I had spoken to several older groups that didn’t have half the knowledge that these young kids had on diving.) At 10 p.m. they were still asking when Russell Dennett came up and told me I had to knock it off because these kids had to go to school the next morning.

In the years of diving I only had three or four close calls. Once in Haskell’s Quarry in Milford, I went diving a couple of days after getting a cold. I started to descend, got to twelve feet and had to stop because of the pain in my head and ears. (The pressure on your body doubles when diving, from 15 pounds per square inch to 30 lb./psi at 15 feet.) I had to come back up to ten feet, and then I got back down to 15 feet and then back up to 12. I worked my way to the bottom of the quarry at 80 feet. I figured my sinuses were clogged and this would clear them out. John Cyr was with me and he gave a signal to go to the top. I followed him up and when we got to 15 feet, he kept going but I had to stop because me head felt like it was going to explode. When I went back down to 20 feet I was okay. I did this several times with no luck. I was stuck at 20 feet. I stayed there for five minutes, but still the same problem. I had two choices; stay there and run out of air or go straight to the top. I had to gamble.

I dropped my weight belt and started for the surface as fast as I could, not breathing, but exhaling. When I got to 12 feet I heard an explosion in my head. The pressure was gone, but when I got to the surface I was completely blind. I tore off my mask and threw it up on the rocks. I thought my eyeball had blown out of my head.  In a few minutes my eyesight started to come back. When I climbed out of the water and looked at my mask I saw the problem. My mask was full of blood and mucus. That’s why I couldn’t see. I had a bloody nose for a few minutes, but no ruptured eardrums or other problem. I had learned not to dive right after a cold.

My other close call was in Lincoln, Rhode Island. John and I had found a small safe. The door had been ripped off, but there was a small cash safe welded inside. We hauled it out of the water and decided to cut the cash box out with a hammer and chisel. I was pounding away when I heard two car doors slam shut. I turned to look and saw two Rhode Island state troopers standing behind us, guns pointed at our heads and screaming at us to drop the hammer and get on our bellies.

I think both John and I wet our wetsuits that day. The trooper called the Hopedale police and everything was okay. They took the safe and a couple of days later they got it open and there was nothing inside. A year later we got a call from the State Police at Lincoln, R.I., asking for our help. We met the same two troopers at the quarry. Kids had spotted a Caddy about 30 feet down. The state police thought it had belonged to a bookie from Providence who was missing. We took the license plate off of the car, checked inside and used the same hammer and chisel that we had used a year earlier on the safe. We punched out the lock on the trunk and opened it, looking for the bookie’s body. No body. About three months later we were told that they found him hiding out in Florida. It seems he owed the Mafia a lot of money and decided to get lost.