Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (19 page)

No one was more in need of that than Wolffe and Burgess. The already modest fortunes of each had taken a hit during the war, and each man was scrambling to pay the bills. Although in the wake of his successful crossing Burgess had received a modest windfall—the Nestle Company paid him to endorse its chocolate, and even Wolffe had received an endorsement opportunity from Shredded Wheat cereal—those days had long since passed. He had given up life as a blacksmith in favor of operating a Paris garage, but the war virtually destroyed his business. When Channel swimmers waving not pound notes or francs but dollar bills began knocking on the doors of both men—Wolffe in Brighton, on the English coast, and Burgess in his cottage atop Cape Gris-Nez—they were invited inside. Each man soon discovered that, in the summer at least, training Channel swimmers could be something like a full-time occupation. It certainly beat working.

The first swimmer of note to return to the Channel waters was the first serious American contestant, Henry Sullivan of Lowell, Massachusetts. The portly son of a Lowell businessman, Sullivan, like Matthew Webb, favored the breaststroke. He had tried and failed to swim the Channel in 1913 but as soon as the mines were cleared he announced his intention to try again in 1920.

He wasn't alone. Jabez Wolffe himself still entertained his own dim dream of making it across, and there was a growing list of others determined to try the swim, among them a waiter from Boston named Charles Toth, the Canadian Omer Perrault, Georges Michel from France, and Enrique Sebastian Tirabocchi, a native of Genoa, Italy, who was now a citizen of Argentina. Over the next few years all these swimmers and more would make repeated attempts to swim the Channel.

It was no accident that so many were now determined to try. Before the war, for those few men who were determined to swim the Channel, the biggest impediment to the swim—apart from the tide and the weather—had been money. It was costly to spend the better part of two months in either England or France, training and awaiting the proper conditions. But after the war the European economy had collapsed, and most of Europe was in the throes of a deep recession. In 1923 one U.S. dollar was worth about seventeen French francs, or nearly four English pounds, making a middle-class American wealthy. Suddenly one didn't need to be a millionaire to finance a swim across the Channel.

What a swimmer did need was the funds to provide for room and board either in Dover or, if one chose to swim from France, in Calais or Boulogne or the village of Gris-Nez. Apart from that the only requirement was an accompanying pilot boat and crew, and there were plenty of boats and boat captains of varying ability available to escort swimmers across the Channel.

That was where Wolffe and Burgess came in. Although nothing beyond their experience in Channel waters really qualified either man as a swimming coach, they were still invaluable. In addition to their experience in the water each man had extensive contacts with boat captains on each side of the Channel, for each had made the crossing himself by boat many, many times. These local mariners had an intimate knowledge of the tides and weather conditions and were more than willing to assist a crossing in exchange for cash. Once a swimmer was in the water the boat captain became almost solely responsible for navigating the swimmer across the Channel.

Beginning in 1920, and for the next several summers, each man was kept busy. Burgess found more or less part-time employment from Henry Sullivan, because after Sullivan failed in 1920 he kept returning and kept trying. He was something of a throwback, for while most swimmers had given up the breaststroke in favor of the sidestroke, or a combination, Sullivan, although he occasionally used both the sidestroke and the old trudgen, much favored the breaststroke.

Finally, on August 9, 1923, in his sixth attempt, Henry Sullivan became the third man to swim the Channel. But he didn't so much swim it as bob across in one of the most grueling efforts in the history of Channel swimming. The
New York Times
reported that at times he "drifted, scarcely making progress," and "sometimes he lost distance for hours at a time," for Sullivan simply wasn't a powerful enough swimmer to swim either against or across the current. As such it took him more than a full day—twenty-six hours and fifty minutes—to cross, so long that by the time the normally clean-shaven swimmer walked ashore, he had grown a beard.

Both Wolffe and Burgess took some credit for his success—at various times Sullivan had consulted with each man—but Burgess received the greatest acclaim. He, and not Wolffe, had been on board the pilot boat for Sullivan's entire journey.

Although Sullivan collected his one thousand pounds from the
Sketch
and hustled off to London for what he hoped were some lucrative opportunities, he had precious little time to enjoy his no toriety. Only three days later, Enrique Tirabocchi, leaving from France, crossed in only sixteen hours and twenty-three minutes, cutting eight hours from Webb's record. His achievement was stunning, and again Burgess basked in the afterglow—once again, he had been aboard one of the pilot boats. Wolffe had been in the water, but had been accompanying another swimmer, one of four who tried to swim the Channel that day. Only Tirabocchi—and Burgess—found success.

Incredibly, one month later, on September 9, another one of those swimmers, Charles Toth of Boston, who was trained by Burgess, became the third person to successfully swim the Channel, nearly matching Tirabocchi's mark with a time of sixteen hours and fifty minutes. Unlike Sullivan and Tirabocchi, however, Toth gained little from his achievement apart from the satisfaction of having done it. The
Daily Sketch,
after paying out two one-thousand-pound offers in a matter of days, had withdrawn the prize before Toth's swim. Swimming the Channel was suddenly becoming almost commonplace.

In just a few short weeks the entire nature of crossing the Channel had changed. Three successful swims in such close proximity seemed to indicate that, somehow, swimming the Channel had been "solved" and simply wasn't as challenging as it once had been. To the great dismay of Jabez Wolffe, Bill Burgess was the common denominator for all three successful swims, and it appeared as if he somehow possessed a secret key to crossing the Channel.

That wasn't entirely true. Part of the reason the three swimmers had succeeded was the weather, which had been unusually favorable, and the fact that so many swimmers were in the water trying at the same time. The 1923 season had been the busiest in Channel history—nearly twenty separate swims had been attempted—increasing the odds that someone would succeed.

There had also been an enormous amount of luck involved. Both Tirabocchi and Toth had landed on a tiny point of land that extended into the Channel between Cape Margaret's Bay and Kingsdown—literally a spit of sand only about a yard wide at the base of a sheer cliff. Had either man missed the point, each would have been swept several miles farther down the coast and may not have finished at all.

Yet luck was not the only reason. The era of the breaststroke and sidestroke was beginning to end, for despite Sullivan's success, both Tirabocchi and Toth used a variety of strokes but primarily depended upon the trudgen, which allowed both to swim far faster than previous Channel conquerors. In so doing, each was able to avoid a tidal change, allowing both men to swim the Channel in a course that more resembled the single letter Z rather than the squat double Z that Webb and Sullivan had followed.

Still, swimming the Channel remained a significant challenge. Over the next few years the goal of many swimmers would not be so much to swim the Channel, but to swim the Channel faster or in some kind of novel way.

Five men had already conquered the Channel. As the
Boston Globe
asked after Toth's swim, "Who will be the first woman to swim the English Channel?"

O
N THE MORNING
of Saturday, August 5, 1922, dawn in Manhattan revealed one of those rare perfect days that happen only a few times each summer and make New York seem the center of the season. Blue skies, a gentle breeze, and a few puffy white clouds sent New Yorkers outside in droves. For sports fans—and nearly everyone was a sports fan—there was, truly, something for everyone.

In Seabright, New Jersey, just south of the Highlands on the Jersey Shore, some three thousand spectators turned out to see Boston's Leslie Bancroft try to knock off women's tennis champion Molla Mallory. Several thousand more traveled a bit farther south to Spring Lake where U.S. Open golf champion Gene Sarazen was scheduled to play the English champion Long Jim Barnes in thirty-six holes of match play. Excursion trains heading up the Hudson River were packed to overflowing as the biggest crowd of the racing season, more than fifteen thousand strong, pressed through the gates at Saratoga Springs to see thoroughbred sensation Martingale race in the prestigious U.S. Hotel Stakes for two-year-old thoroughbreds. A similar number of fans poured from the Ninth Avenue elevated train station near the Polo Grounds in Manhattan to see the New York Giants, in a pitched battle for first place in the National League, play host for the Chicago Cubs. And in Brooklyn, even though the Dodgers—then better known as the Robins—were in sixth place, another eight thousand fans packed Ebbets Field for a doubleheader between Brooklyn's nine and the Reds of Cincinnati. Just outside New York parks and beaches were packed to overflowing, while those who remained in the city flocked to Central Park and to Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

In later years, the dean of American sportswriters, Grantland Rice, would refer to the decade of the 1920s as a golden age that spawned "sport's first tidal wave of popularity."

Rice was correct, for in the 1920s, America was sports mad. For the first time in the nation's history both participating in and watching sports became something of a national obsession.

Despite the restrictions of Prohibition after the war, America not only cut loose and cut ties with the repressive Victorian era and its restrictive sense of morality, but shed its insularity and became part of the world. The biplane heralded a new era in transportation, radio broadcasts and telephones began to become commonplace. News traveled faster and farther. What happened today could be known halfway across the world in a matter of minutes. The world had become smaller almost overnight.

Returning servicemen had seen Gay Paree and weren't turning back, while those they had left behind when they joined the service—women—had entered the workplace and emerged from the war with a newfound sense of independence and self-esteem. Hemlines started to rise, and women who had run households and worked during the war weren't satisfied to resume their place before the hearth, darning socks.

Americans suddenly felt unbound and embarked on a headlong rush to have as much fun as possible. They didn't want to sit around, either. The economy was booming, and for the first time in American history a significant number of Americans had both the time and the money to indulge themselves. With the possible exception of the speakeasy, spectator sports suddenly became America's favorite pastime. Before the war, only baseball, boxing, horse racing, and bicycling had much of a fan following. But after the war, sports of all kinds grew exponentially, in terms of both spectators and participants. Even lesser sports such as yachting, wrestling, billiards, and rowing enjoyed newfound popularity. Daredevils such as Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelley became celebrities and elevated stunts like flagpole sitting to near respectability, while ersatz sports, like dance marathons and six-day bicycle races, attracted thousands of spectators. With no television and still-limited access to radio broadcasts, most sports fans had to either attend the event in person or read about it in the paper.

Even swimming was on the precipice of a boom. Within a decade, water shows and carnivals that mixed athletic competition and artistry would draw thousands of fans to outdoor pools and indoor arenas. As yet, however, women's swimming was still something of a fringe sport, drawing press attention and the occasional curious crowd, such as that at the Day Cup race; but unless an international star such as Hilda James was participating, swimming attracted few spectators.

But as the surprisingly large turnout to the Day Cup race had indicated, that was about to change. All the sport needed was a catalyst, the swimming equivalent of a Babe Ruth or Red Grange, a charismatic figure who would give the sport a personality.

To no surprise, among the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who set off that morning to enjoy the fine summer weather, thousands descended on Brighton Beach and the Brighton Beach Baths, most arriving by either train or subway. But what was shocking was that despite the fine weather several thousand of the visitors showed no interested whatsoever in the beach or in the Baths' several public pools, at least not at first. Instead they gathered around the twenty-five-yard competition pool, pressing forward until it appeared as if were one person to fall in, hundreds more might follow in a massive chain reaction.

They had all come to see Trudy. Five days before she hadn't even been worthy of a mention in all the press buildup to the Day Cup, but now people who had never cared a wit for swimming were willing to give up half their weekend just to see her. The WSA had been so stunned by the public interest in Trudy that she was quickly added to the roster of WSA swimmers invited to compete against Hilda James in a special 300-meter invitational race. In the last few days the race had been touted as a return test between "the victor and the vanquished," Trudy Ederle versus everyone else.

Trudy herself hadn't quite known what to think when her name was quickly added to the race, but Meg was absolutely thrilled to see her sister suddenly considered one of the WSA's top talents. The past few days had been a whirlwind in the Highlands. With Trudy's parents still overseas neither Trudy nor her family quite knew how to deal with her sudden notoriety.