In 1954, twenty-two-year-old Zale Parry strapped on an aqualung fitted with an untested safety valve and swam down into the water off Catalina Island, California, not stopping until her instruments read 209 feet. The dive set a women's world depth record, according to the Catalina Islander, and the valve proved reliable enough that it became a standard feature on scuba regulators for decades afterward, according to DeeperBlue. Parry, who went on to introduce millions of television viewers to the undersea world as a co-star of Sea Hunt and became known across the diving industry as the First Lady of Diving, died July 19, 2026, at her home in Tillamook, Oregon, at age 93, according to Divernet.

Parry was born March 19, 1933, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the oldest of seven children. She studied theater arts at UCLA and spent time working at 20th Century Fox alongside actress Agnes Moorehead before the water pulled her career in a different direction. She began skin diving in 1947, the same period she started performing as a water ballet swimmer with the Sam Howard Aqua Follies, and moved into the newly available scuba gear in 1951. Diving, at the time, had almost no American instructional infrastructure and almost no women in it; Parry helped build both.

With her husband, hyperbaric medicine researcher Parry Bivens, she co-founded Scientific Underwater Research Enterprises in 1953, an early equipment testing venture that helped design and build one of California's first civilian hyperbaric chambers, giving early sport divers a place to be treated for decompression sickness at a time when almost none existed outside the military. That work put her in the water testing new gear, including the Hope-Page non-return valve that carried her to the 1954 depth record off Catalina, and in 1954 she also became the third woman to earn her instructor rating through the Los Angeles County Underwater Instructor Certification Course, one of the first formal scuba certification programs in the country.

Her certification led producers to cast her in Kingdom of the Sea, a 1954 series distributed to 70 countries in which she closed all 78 episodes with a short segment on water safety, according to DiveNewswire. Four years later she was cast in Sea Hunt opposite Lloyd Bridges, working as an actress, stunt performer and technical advisor and helping teach Bridges to scuba dive for the role; the series ran until 1961 and introduced millions of television viewers to recreational scuba diving through the late 1950s and early 1960s. She also doubled underwater for Sophia Loren in Boy on a Dolphin and for Carroll Baker, and in May 1955 she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in her dive gear, one of the first times the sport had reached a mainstream American magazine cover.

Parry kept building the sport's institutions long after the cameras stopped rolling. She co-founded the International Underwater Film Festival in 1957 and, in 1960, became the first woman elected president of the Underwater Photographic Society. In 2001 she co-authored Scuba America: The Human History of Sport Diving with fellow pioneer Al Tillman, documenting the history of the sport she had helped write in real time. The diving industry honored her repeatedly for that half century of work: the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences gave her its NOGI Award for Distinguished Service in 1973 and later named her its Lifetime Ambassador at Large, and the Diving Equipment and Marketing Association presented her its Reaching Out Award in 1993 before naming her a Hall of Fame Ambassador who greeted members at its annual trade show for years afterward. The Women's Scuba Association named her its Scuba Diver of the Year in 1999, and in 2000 she entered both the National Association of Underwater Instructors' hall of fame and the inaugural class of the Women Divers Hall of Fame; she was inducted into the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame two years later. In 2006 she established the Zale Parry Scholarship to fund students pursuing undersea exploration, marine conservation, hyperbaric medicine and diving technology.

News of her death drew tributes from across the diving world. The Women Divers Hall of Fame called her one of diving's true pioneers, and diving industry journalist Rosemary "Roz" Lunn, a longtime conference organizer within the trade, described her as a force of nature, adding that her influence can still be seen every time a diver slips beneath the surface, according to X-Ray Mag. Cave diving instructor and marine conservationist Cristina Zenato remembered her simply as the First Lady of Diving, the nickname that had followed Parry since the 1950s and that the industry used for her one final time.

Parry's name now marks a scholarship fund rather than a diving school, but the valve she tested off Catalina still sits inside modern regulators, and the water safety segments she filmed for Kingdom of the Sea and the episodes of Sea Hunt she shared with Lloyd Bridges still circulate as the entry point into diving for people who never met her. The hyperbaric chamber she helped build gave a generation of California divers somewhere to go when a dive went wrong, and the scholarship she endowed keeps sending new students into hyperbaric research and marine conservation. The book she wrote with Al Tillman remains one of the few complete histories of how recreational scuba diving became an American pastime, built in no small part by the woman who was there testing the equipment, teaching the classes and, for a while, playing herself on television.