Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (51 page)

One cannot write about Trudy Ederle without confronting the water. Although I can swim, no one would mistake me for anything but a novice. Although I had hoped to add to this skill set during the writing of this book, several minor health issues prevented me from doing so. Yet the water still managed to inform this process. I am fortunate enough to live on Lake Champlain in northern Vermont, a body of water more than 120 miles in length and, at its widest point, 11 miles wide. To assist me with this book—and for my own enjoyment—over the last two years I have spent hours and hours on Lake Champlain, traveling several hundred miles by kayak in a wide variety of weather conditions to gain some insight into the challenge and conditions Trudy Ederle faced when she attempted to swim the Channel. I have made trips as long as fifteen miles that have lasted half a day or more, both in calm water and in storms that caused waves and swells of several feet, in water temperatures ranging from the upper middle forties to the low seventies, in the sun, the rain, and the fog, against and with winds of upward of fifteen knots—Beaufort force four—at dawn and dusk, at night, and in other conditions that sometimes skirted the edge of common sense and more than tested my own abilities and endurance. When one is already exhausted and alone several miles from shore in deteriorating weather and solely dependent on one's own physical effort to make it to shore, one becomes acutely aware of the challenges and dangers posed by the water.

And while I am not much of a swimmer, I still managed to spend as much time as possible in the water itself, including one chilled hour paddling about in the shallows in water of only sixty degrees. As a longtime runner I also have some experience with the solitude of athletic competition. Although all these experiences do not compare with those Trudy Ederle faced in the English Channel, they still provided me with some valuable insight into not only the physical challenge of her quest, but the mental and psychological challenges as well. These experiences were invaluable in the writing of this book.

Formal interviews played little role in this volume. All of Trudy Ederle's contemporaries are deceased, as are her siblings, although she was survived by nieces, nephews, and other relatives who helped take care of her in her final years. At the beginning of this project I contacted her nephew, informed him about this project, and inquired as to whether he or anyone else in the family would either care to share any material they might have in their possession or agree to interviews. He indicated that the family intended to pursue its own project and declined to become involved in mine. That was certainly the family's right and I respected that decision. In the end, in fact, it was probably best that this project proceeded independently, unfettered by the constraints that families sometimes impose upon a subject. Over two decades of writing sports history I have found that families are rarely the best resource in regard to a subject. Their judgment is too often clouded by sentiment and compromised by personal relationships with the subject. Family myths, passed down generation by generation, often get in the way of the truth and are can sometimes be at odds with objective reporting.

I was able to locate a substantial amount of newsreel footage of Trudy Ederle both in training and swimming the Channel in both 1925 and 1926, as well as motion pictures that detailed her reception in New York, much of it produced by the British Pathe film company. While the narration and/or captioning of such newsreels was often incorrect, and the film itself sometimes misleading (despite what the newsreels infer, there is no film of Trudy arriving at Kingsdown—it is a recreation made during daylight the following afternoon), often combining footage of both swims into a single account, they were nevertheless quite useful for the details the images revealed. British Pathe films consulted include
Girl Conquers the Channel
(1926), "
Trudy's" Welcome Home
(1926),
For Channel Swim
(1925), and "
Trudie" Turns Teacher
(nd). Bud Greenspan's
The Barrier Breakers
includes not only much of the same newsreel footage, but footage of Trudy Ederle in her later years and interviews with Ederle's niece and nephew. Unfortunately no copies are known to exist of the silent film
Swim, Girl, Swim
in which Trudy appeared with Bebe Daniels, playing a swimmer. Although minor health issues prevented me from traveling to the English Channel, I was fortunate to survey hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs not only of Trudy Ederle and other principals in this book, but also of the settings in which her story took place. These sources include Corbis, Getty, Brown Brothers, the Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library, the New
York Times,
the Associated Press, the New York Historical Society, Topfoto, and photographs that have been preserved in newspapers both in microfilm and online. No physical description of any person or place in this book has been made that was not informed by facts.

Similarly, all dialogue used in this book is taken directly from a previously published source. Anything that appears in quotation marks is from a written document. No dialogue has been created, although in a few instances in which different sources reproduced dialogue about a specific event or occurrence that was not identical, I have used my own judgment or created a composite statement.

The greatest challenge of this undertaking was to animate my subject, to give her life and reveal her personality, a task that is never easy in any instance, but one that is particularly difficult when the events took place so long ago. For this reason I have chosen to refer to her as "Trudy" throughout this book rather than her given name "Gertrude." Although she herself used "Gertrude" throughout her adult life, as a girl and young woman her family and friends, by all accounts, referred to her as "Trudy," and I have chosen to do the same. Again, I have used the accumulation of detail in an attempt to provide genuine insight into her experience in swimming the Channel. But all impressions, events, and experiences I assign to her during her time in the water are factually based on statements later made by Trudy Ederle herself or by others.

Cleveland, Marcia.
Dover Solo: Swimming the English Channel.
Canada: MMJ Press, 1999.

An account of the preparations necessary to swim the Channel today.

Cox, Lynne.
Swimming to Antarctica.
New York: Knopf, 2004.

The most accomplished open-water swimmer of the modern age, Cox's acute observations about long-distance swimming and her colorful accounts of her various swims, including her swim of the Channel, should be required reading for anyone contemplating swimming the Channel or writing about it.

Danzig, Alison, and Peter Brandwein, eds.
Sport's Golden Age: A Close-up of the Fabulous Twenties.
New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948.

Louis de Breda Handley authored the chapter on American swimming.

Dawson, Buck.
Mermaids on Parade: America's Love Affair with Its First Olympic Women Swimmers.
Huntington, NY: Kroshka Books, 2000.

Dawson, the executive director of the International Swimming Hall of Fame, profiled more than thirty women swimmers, including Trudy Ederle and other Women's Swimming Association stars such asAileen Riggin, Ethelda "Thelda" Bleibtrey, Helen Wainwright, and others. His 1994 interview with Ederle is the most thorough ever published. Although Dawson incorrectly states that it was her first interview in more than fifty years, it was certainly her most revealing. She had politely turned down interview requests for years before Dawson surprised her the day after her eighty-eighth birthday and spoke with her for two hours.

Ederle was surprisingly frank. In addition to her remarks about herself, she offered that she did not believe that many who claim to swim the Channel actually accomplish the feat. She stated bluntly that Louis de Breda Handley told her that "the next one," Mille Gade Corson, "didn't do it honestly.
"

Gipe, George.
The Great American Sports Book.
New York: Doubleday and Company, 1978.

Contains a surprisingly accurate account of her swim and a valuable overview and background on the development of women's athletics.

Handley, Louis de Breda.
Swimming for Women.
New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1925.

Handley was widely considered the greatest swimming teacher and coach of the era. This book was endorsed by the Women's Swimming Association and includes valuable background on the organization.

Johnson, Captain Tim.
History of Open Water Marathon Swimming.
Buzzard's Bay, MA: Captain's Engineering Services, 2005.

An overview of the history of swimming, focusing on long-distance swims in open water.

Johnston, Charles H. L.
Famous American Athletes of Today.
Essay Index Reprint Series. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971.

A reprint of a book first published in 1928, it includes a lengthy, if somewhat overwrought, profile ofEderle's career.

Mortimer, Gavin.
The Great Swim.
New York: Walker and Company, 2008.

Although I was initially distressed to learn that another author was writing about Trudy, Mortimer's thorough account focuses not on Trudy Ederle alone, but on the events of the summer of 1926, when more than a dozen swimmers were planning to swim the Channel. Although I disagree with his thesis, which I believe much overstates the competition between the four swimmers he chooses to focus upon, it is nonetheless a worthy addition to the literature of the sport.

O'Donnell, Edward T.
Ship Ablaze.
New York: Broadway Books, 2003.

A superb account of the
Slocum
disaster.

Unwin, Peter.
The Narrow Sea.
London: Review, 2003.

A thorough survey history of the English Channel.

Watson, Kathy.
The Crossing.
New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.

A fine biography of Matthew Webb, the first person to swim the English Channel.

Wennerberg, Conrad.
Wind, Waves, and Sunburn: A Brief History of Marathon Swimming.
New York: Breakaway Books, 1974.

Contains a lengthy chapter on swimming the Channel.

Whelan, Grover.
Mr. New York.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1955.

Whelan provides a detailed account of Ederle's reception in New York.

Prologue

My account of Trudy's time in the water during her successful swim is gleaned from a number of sources, but the extensive interview she gave to Buck Dawson of the International Swimming Hall of Fame, which appeared in his book
Mermaids on Parade,
was among the most valuable, as were the accounts of her swim by her ghostwriter, Julia Harpman, for the
News-Tribune
syndicate, Alec Rutherford's reporting for the
New York Times,
and wire reports. As previously stated, all impressions, events, and experiences I assign to her during her time in the water are based on facts and on statements later made by Trudy Ederle herself or by others. Background on the history of Channel swimmers was provided by three Web sites:
www.channel
swimmingassociation.com, the governing body overseeing Channel swims today;
www.channelswimming.net
, the site of the Channel Swimming and Piloting Federation; and
www.doversolo.com
, Marcia Cleveland's Web site promoting her book of the same name.

1. Overboard

The role that the sinking of the
General Slocum
played in the dissemination of swimming, particularly in regard to women, was inspired by an online exhibit maintained by the International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF). Edward T. O'Donnell's account of the disaster, cited above, was invaluable. Anna Weber's story was one of many first-person accounts made by survivors of the disaster and appears on www.garemaritime.com/features/general-slocum/. Sadly, her tragic experience was typical. The online exhibit at the International Swimming Hall of Fame, From Bloomer's to Bikini's: How the Sport of Swimming Changed Western Culture in the 20th Century (
www.ishof.org/pdf/history_swimwear.pdf
), first alerted me to the connection between women's swimming and the
Slocum
disaster.

2. The Challenge

I found no single comprehensive history of swimming to be entirely satisfying, but the online resources of the International Swimming Hall of Fame were useful, as was ISHOF's "The Development of the Modern Stroke," as reprinted by the
Washington Post
online during the 2004 Olympics (nd). See also Charles Sprawson's
The Swimmer as Hero
and Johnson's
History of Open Water Marathon Swimming.
Unwin's
The Narrow Sea
provides a comprehensive history of human interaction with the English Channel.

3. Highlands

Background and history of the Ederle family was acquired through
New York Passenger List
records,
Petition for Naturalization Records, World War I Draft Registration Cards, Social Security Death Index,
and
U.S. Census Records
for both 1910 and 1920. Background on the Highlands came from a variety of standard reference sources. Flora T. Higgins's
Remembering the 20th Century: An Oral History of Monmouth County,
Interview with Mae Schwind Bahrs (Monmouth County Library, Monmouth, NJ, 2002), and "Still Making Splash" (
Star-Ledger;
October 3, 2003) were particularly useful to provide detailed background.