From the archives: This story originally appeared in the February 1956 issue of Popular Mechanics. We’re republishing it now as part of our ongoing look back at Pop Mech’s best feature stories from the last 125 years. It appears here as originally published; some details, terminology, or understandings may have changed over time.

Patrolman Ron Faires of the Seattle Police Department moved slowly through the enveloping darkness to the automobile, yanked open a rear door and shot the beam of his flashlight inside. There they were—stacked on the floor—the stolen Army rifles from Spokane.

All this would have been pretty routine for a police officer, except that the car happened to be under 30 feet of water in Hicks Lake. Faires was in uniform, but an odd one for a patrolman … a frogman diving outfit.

Two young men had stolen both car and rifles in the eastern Washington city, then raced across the broad and flat expanse of the Columbia Basin and up the winding highway over the Cascade Mountains to Seattle. There the heat was on, and the fleeing thieves decided to “cool off” the car with its arsenal by running it into the lake.

A report that a driverless car had been seen plunging into the lake brought police to the scene, then a call for Seattle’s frogman police unit. Result: recovery of the sunken loot and jail for the looters, who were later picked up.

The frogman unit drifted into the Seattle Police Department like a stranger looking for a berth for the night. At first the diving activities were just an off-duty hobby of Patrolman Faires. Then Patrolmen Ted Yerabek and Ed Francis became interested, and there were three frogmen looking for opportunities to don rubber suits, masks, lead weights and air tanks.

The opportunities came fast—so fast that Chief of Police H. J. Lawrence decided to make the frogman duties official. The unit—Underwater Search and Recovery—is now part of the Patrol Division, of which Captain Jack Porter is chief.

“With all the shore line we’ve got to patrol around here—about 200 miles—it’s not hard to guess where a killer is going to toss the murder weapon,” said Porter, “or where yeggs are going to dump a safe after they have looted it. The water is handy for getting rid of the evidence—like the bottom of a theater seat for parking chewing gum. But, once we can determine the general vicinity, the frogmen more often than not can do the rest.

“The murder weapon may be wet, but the fingerprints are likely to be still there. The cash may be gone from the safe, but valuable records may be recovered.

“Then there are the drownings—with the grief-stricken members of the family. They search. They wait. They know that death has come, but they don’t start to readjust their own lives until the body is found. Nothing is definite without the body.”

The frogmen are now used to recovering bodies of drowning victims; that is, as used to sudden death as one can get.

“When I find the body down there in the blackness,” said Officer Faires, “I switch off my light and come up without seeing. You’ve got to be impersonal about death, or it will get you.”

The frogmen just don’t sit around headquarters playing pinochle and waiting for a waterfront call. All of them have other duties. Faires rides a prowl car, and Yerabek and Francis walk beats. But take a night like this one…

It had started in a routine fashion for Faires and his partner in their prowl car: a speeder ticketed… a sidewalk-sleeping “wino” prodded into wakefulness and told to go home… a drunk in a tavern threatening other customers.

The drunk was carted off to the station and booked for disorderly conduct. Faires was just getting back into the prowler car when the loudspeaker intoned:

“Drowning at Lake Union Dock. Man fell into water stepping from boat to dock. Frogman job… Faires…”

Whine of the siren as the prowler car raced to Faires’ home… there Faires transferred to his own car, its trunk compartment always loaded with complete diving equipment.

At the dock, the Harbor Patrol was already on the job, but its grappling hooks had become fouled in old cable at the bottom of the lake. Cable… it can embrace and trap a diver sometimes like the tentacles of an octopus.

Wary of what he might run into below, Faires slipped into the black water with his diving outfit. At 28 feet, he touched bottom and began to move in a pattern designed to cover every foot of the designated area.

His light showed him a snarl of cable dead ahead. Carefully, he circled. Then he came to a tangle of barbed wire—as treacherous as that placed before a war trench. More so for a frogman, because the barbs can tear holes in the rubber suit.

Faires felt for the pouch at his side to be sure it was loaded. This is an innovation of his own—a pouch with Ping-Pong balls. If he should become trapped, he would release the balls, and when they floated to the surface the people above would know he was in trouble.

The Ping-Pong balls were in the pouch all right, and Faires glided over the wire to resume the pattern. An old piece of piling, one end stuck in the mud, loomed up. The drowning victim lay just a few feet away. Faires grasped the body around the waist, turned off his light, and groped upward.

Standing alone on the dock as he struggled out of his clinging, dripping rubber suit, Faires heard someone say: “…father of seven children.”

Then there was the week before Christmas—cold with traces of snow on the sidewalk as Officer Francis walked his beat on upper Pike. A Santa Claus jingled his bell beside a money pot, and a young punk loitered beside the pot with his eye on the money. Francis told the loiterer to move on, then checked with headquarters at a call box.

Detective Homer Tipton wanted him for a frogman job… Duwamish River… cold or not … now.

Francis grinned. He had a special outfit for diving at this time of year. It was a heated Air Force pilot’s suit—that is, it had once been electrically heated, but all the wires had been pulled out. Still, it provided a comforting shield of warmth between body and rubber suit.

Burglars had stolen a safe from the Vance Cafe, and Detective Tipton had a tip that the safe was at the bottom of the Duwamish River. The cold, swirling waters of the stream did not look too inviting when Frogman Francis stepped in. But he moved with the determination of a patrolman on duty—underwater duty.

He had not been long beneath the surface when some slowly moving object bumped him, knocked him down. Francis turned his light, and what he saw was the most startling sight he had ever encountered under water.

Then, within his mask, Francis chuckled. He was looking at a dead cow.

Minutes later he had the blown safe. Cash and checks were gone, but some important papers were still intact.

And Christmas can even loom up for a police-frogman in midsummer.

Officer Yerabek, who ordinarily walks a beat in the Belltown district, got a call in the heat of the afternoon to dive for the body of a four-year-old boy who had drowned off the Salmon Bay Terminal.

When Yerabek went down he first found himself crawling along sunken logs. Then he drifted into a forest of evergreens. This was an experience that had not come even to Alice in Wonderland—walking through a forest beneath the water. But when Yerabek grasped a tree it moved. Then he knew. A Christmas-tree merchant had used the bay for dumping his surplus stock.

Just about everything ever found by charwomen cleaning up in a theater has been discovered by the police-frogmen while on diving jobs. One thing that puzzles them, however, is the odd places they have found lost golf balls such as off the West Waterway Bridge.

A 23-year-old man had turned Fagin in the “Oliver Twist” manner and trained teen-agers as purse snatchers. When caught, a teen-ager talked. The looted purses were habitually tossed off the bridge by the gang’s master-mind. Officer Faires went down into the water and retrieved the purse evidence—plus golf balls. Seattle, he figures, has some long-distance drivers.

Among other odd and incidental recoveries was the Laura Lee, a 29-foot cruiser which sank in Lake Washington in 1942 when, in a storm, she was blown against the Floating Bridge. The battered Laura Lee was not exactly a rich find. But Faires is hoping for better luck.

Chief Lawrence has offered the services of the Underwater Search and Recovery Unit to other police departments in the area, and that means the frogmen are likely to get assignments in a great many different waters. On the wall in his home, Faires has tacked up a coastal chart showing the more than 450 places where ships have been sunk. Under water, he is continually on the lookout for those sunken ships.

Ask the three police-frogmen what their off-duty hobbies are, and you get one answer: swimming and diving. Each began swimming before school age.

“My brothers took me out to Pier 91, gave me a pair of water wings and said, ‘Swim,’” recalled Yerabek. “I started dog-paddling like mad.”

Now he is an instructor in the police-school swimming and first-aid classes. So, too, is Faires, who used to be on the University of Washington swimming team. To augment his police salary—and keep in practice—Faires does commercial diving in his spare time.

For Francis, the police diving is more of the same that he had in a nine-year Navy stretch. During World War II, he served in the South Pacific with an underwater demolition outfit and helped blow up a Grade-A Japanese sea wall to expedite an invasion. Besides wrestling octopuses in Puget Sound waters now, Francis spearfishes cod down where ordinary fishermen don’t go. He tucks about 2,000 pounds of fish in the freezer each year.

All three frogmen are sold on regular police work, but they can’t get too much of the underwater stuff. Once a year, however, when Seattle holds its Seafair, the frogmen get full-time water duty. They are on the alert in Harbor Patrol boats or on docks to dive for anybody who goes overboard—especially during the Gold Cup speedboat trials and races. And usually somebody does—more often than not a small-fry spectator.

Faires had a particularly pleasant rescue job when one of the Seafair princesses was water skiing and, in a spill, hit her face on a ski. Semiconscious, she floundered in the water, and Faires dove. He swam back to the dock with her and showed her onto it. The spectators were so startled by the scene, no one offered to help. So Faires climbed on the dock, picked up the girl, carried her ashore and gave her first aid. It was a one-man frogman show with a beautiful girl as the “prop.”

But Faires says he got the biggest boot out of Seafair duty in retrieving a cannon. At the Corinthian Yacht Club an 18-inch cannon has long been used to start the sailboat races. Only this time the starter became overenthusiastic with his powder pouring. The cannon went off—into the water. Faires dove down 36 feet, and quickly recovered it.

The frogmen will go deeper if they have to—more than 100 feet down. And the Seattle Underwater Search and Recovery Unit, one of the newest police organizations in the nation, will go far.