Remembering Gregg Stanton – Part 2.

By Travis Kersting

In Part 1, Travis recounted chasing his dream of scuba diving, even while living in Minnesota, meeting Gregg Stanton and a dive convention and being offered a job in Wakulla. To continue:
He promised to increase my pay as I built skills and the business rebounded.
Gregg Stanton wasn’t a businessman, he was an academic. A fact he was proud of and one he repeated to anyone who stopped in to see the dive center. He had retired as a professor from FSU well before I met him and then he attempted to make his home fill station, and business as an independent scuba instructor, into a proper brick-and-mortar store with Wakulla Diving Center.
Long road trips because of Gregg became the norm, not the exception. We drove round trip to Las Vegas for DEMA twice, south and central Florida many times, up the east coast to Pennsylvania and later to DC twice. We didn’t listen to music, we discussed business and dreamt up new plots to make his hobby-store work. He didn’t have conventional business experience so he would come up with unconventional business ideas. This meant that he afforded me more and more responsibility and freedom to try new things and see what happened. The goal was to pay the bills, build a community, and do interesting things. Gregg wasn’t motivated by profits and regularly reinvested into the business without ever taking a paycheck for himself.
Because of Gregg I met and made friends with countless scuba icons, owners of equipment manufacturing companies, and cave explorers. As example, every year at DEMA, we did what I’d call our “Pyle Stop” and we’d visit Dr. Richard Pyle for 5 minutes and move on. Richard is an ichthyologist in Hawaii who was an active rebreather test diver doing 400-500ft science dives. I could name-drop dozens of (famous in the world of scuba) people that Gregg just knew and he was never afraid to approach any of them to discuss some wild new idea he had.
I left Wakulla Diving Center in March 2019 after giving him six months notice of my intent to depart. Though to this day I don’t think he believed I was quitting because he only showed up to take over on the last day of my employment. Instead, he was living out in Hawaii since 2017, attempting to start another business there at something like 68 years old. Gregg would tell people he didn’t want to retire because when you retire you die. A fact I think his wife Ann never shared the same sentiment about.
Wakulla Diving Center was closed and the building turned over to it’s new owner at the end of June, just two weeks or so before he passed. I guess he was on to something about retiring.
I can say literally that I wouldn’t have the job (working at a rebreather manufacturer), girlfriend, or friends I have today without Gregg. We were often at odds, people would say we acted like a married couple, and we really did drive each other nuts, but at the end of the day we always worked things out. He was honest with me and I was with him. He gave me more responsibility than I ever wanted and more generosity than I probably deserved. I worked hard for his business and his dream because Gregg was an optimist who adamantly believed he could make his dreams a reality even when I or others couldn’t see it.
I am grateful for the time I had with him and the things we accomplished together.