Donna M. Tobias was born on May 22, 1952, in Los Angeles, and grew up in California. Her father was a manufacturer of electromagnets and her mother was a homemaker. With no money for college, she took odd jobs after graduating from high school in Anaheim. She drove a school bus and worked for the police department while taking free classes at Fullerton College. In 1972 she joined the Navy because of her love of the water and the Navy seemed to be a good career choice. Tobias had always been handy and enjoyed jobs that required manual dexterity, so she became a Hull Technician. She was assigned first to Norfolk, Virginia, and then to the Submarine Base in Groton, Connecticut.
At Groton, Tobias entered a field that had long been the domain only of men – she became a deep sea diver. After obtaining a special Pentagon waiver, Tobias had the distinction of becoming the Navy’s first female deep sea diver in 1975, a fact touted on Navy billboards at the time. Although she weighed only 135 pounds she managed to wear a 200-pound diving suit and worked on underwater repairs and search-and-salvage operations. She often dove in water that was dark, cold and turbulent, accompanied by men, some of whom were supportive and others who resented her invasion of their domain. She performed underwater repairs on surface ships and submarines and helped convert two barges into diving and salvage lift craft.
Tobias went on to train sailors in deep sea diving when she served as a submarine escape instructor, hyperbaric chamber operator and SCUBA instructor at the Submarine Escape Training Tank in Groton from 1976 to 1980. Here her work was done in an escape cylinder where she taught students how to escape from a submarine and how to ascend slowly to avoid the bends. She performed the delicate task of operating a hyperbaric chamber and participated in experimental treatments for medical conditions. Concerning her work she said, “If you ever uttered the words, ‘I quit,’ you could never take them back and there were plenty of eyes waiting to see me fail. I didn’t want them asking less of women, for anything. And one of the things that exists…is the camaraderie. We all have each other’s lives in our hands….But you’re all in it together…you get weary together, and you get cold together and you laugh together.”
After eight years in the service, Tobias left the Navy in 1980 with the rate of Hull Technician Second Class and used the G.I. Bill to complete college, earning a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s in psychology. By then she had become interested in teaching and concentrated on working with special needs students. She found this work to be a fulfilling job, and she was able to reach out and affect student’s lives as she was truly interested in their wellbeing. But, all was not always well with her and on September 21, 2010, Donna Tobias took her own life after a long and brave struggle with depression.
In 2001, Donna M. Tobias was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame.
Submitted by CDR Roy A. Mosteller, USNR (Ret)
