“It was another world. A beautiful world.”

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rafipics/

Richard O’Barry grew up on Miami Beach, and spent most of his childhood around and in the water. When he was 5 years old, he found his first dollar on the beach, and used it to buy a pair of goggles to allow him to see underwater. His fascination with diving and marine creatures persisted, and saw him join the U.S. Navy in 1955, at the age of 16, determined to become a diver. In that same year, the Miami Seaqurium first opened, and from the moment he saw it, O’Barry had set his sights on working there.

While he was in the navy, O’Barry ordered the U.S. Navy Diving Manual and studied it himself. At the time, he was too young to become a member of the Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) , and so he resolved to learn how to dive on his own, which he did.

After a 5 year stint in the Navy, O’Barry left and started working for an old family friend and boyhood idol, Art McKee, a South Florida diver and treasure hunter. He worked as a diver, going on several treasure diving expeditions with McKee. During their last expedition together, O’Barry had “an experience of no equal”, the experience of swimming together with wild dolphins. The other divers had mistaken them for sharks, but O’Barry knew better, and dived straight into the water, finding himself surrounded by countless spotted dolphins. After that, he “dreamed only of swimming freely with wild dolphins again”.

Later, it was at the recommendation of McKee that O’Barry got his job as a diver on the Miami Seaquarium Collecting Team, which was in charge of going out to capture sea creatures, dolphins included, to stock the tanks at the Seaquarium and other oceanariums around the world. This would later on lead to his iconic job as the dolphin trainer for the Flipper television series.