I recently read (most of it at least) a fascinating history of NAUI, written primarily by Al Tillman, NAUI Instructor #1. The description of the years from 1960-1970 shows the yearly close relationship among diving, dive instruction, and the dive retailing industry in all its forms. For example, the owners and editors of Skin Diving magazine had a lot of input on what was going on then--NAUI headquarters was located in the Skin Diving magazine building until the magazine changed ownership. NAUI elected to be a non-profit organization when it was first formed not because of any ideals along those lines, but rather because it its leadership came from the world of non-profit organizations and only knew how to set it up that way. A key player was an early organization of scuba retailing stores--The National Association of Skin Diving Stores (NASDS). If you know NASDS under a different name, that is because the word stores was changed when they decided to add scuba instruction to their mission. NASDS was later sold to one of its member store owners, who then merged it with SSI, adopted the SSI name, bought SSI, changed the SSI appraoch to the NASDS approach, and merged with HEAD/Mares to make the first formal relationship between a scuba instruction agency and a scuba equipment maker.
