Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (22 page)

She received all that and even more, meeting Lieutenant Clemington Corson, a thirty-seven-year-old career navy man. Corson not only helped her out with maps, but the two quickly became an item. He taught her how to read the charts, assisted her in her training, and a few months later accompanied her on her swim, trailing her in a rowboat. Gade, primarily using the breaststroke, succeeded, finishing her swim in fifteen hours and fifty-seven minutes, while covering a distance of some forty miles. But in a world increasingly impressed by fads, she received far more attention for her swim than either Elionsky or Dowling had received for theirs, even though Gade was by far the slowest of the three.

Gade was undeterred. Thrilled with the spotlight, in September she set her sights on another swim heavily impacted by the tides and current. She announced that she would swim down the Hudson River from Albany to New York, a distance of some 150 miles. Once more she rode the tide, and she reached Manhattan 153 hours after leaving Albany, spending 63 hours in the water—the first person to accomplish the swim in more than twenty-five years.

The six-day journey kept her in the headlines for a week, and this second swim made Gade famous. Each day she spent in the water she drew more attention, and as she approached New York more and more spectators turned out to watch her pass, and whenever Gade was aware of the crowd she wisely stayed close to shore.

The press loved her. It didn't hurt that Gade, despite her size, photographed well, her blond hair and high cheekbones accentuating a bright and open smile. The story of the immigrant who fell in love with the doughboy was ready-made for the postwar press, and only a few weeks after the swim she and Corson married, using the occasion to announce that Gade—who retained her maiden name in swimming events—next intended to swim the English Channel.

It would be two years, however, before Gade Corson made good on her promised intention. She quickly became pregnant and gave birth to a son, then was hired as swimming instructor on her husband's naval vessel, essentially providing sponsorship for her swimming career, and began training with Louis Leibgold, well-known race walker and physical director of the
Illinois.
In the summer of 1923 she finally made it to England, training with Henry Sullivan and several other men who planned to try to swim the Channel.

She made her first attempt to swim the Channel on August 9, 1923, just a day after Henry Sullivan's successful crossing. But with the French coast in sight, the water turned rough, the tide turned, and Gade Corson was pushed back some seven miles before abandoning her attempt after spending fourteen and a half hours in the water and covering twenty-one miles. Although few made note of it at the time, until the moment she left the water Gade Corson had actually outperformed Sullivan, swimming much faster than the American man.

Like a sand castle facing a rising tide, the barriers that barred women from competing in sports were beginning to fall. As Thelda Bleibtrey had told the
Ladies' Home Journal
earlier that summer, "The tremendous advance of women in athletics during the past twenty years, and especially in the past five years, has been a thrilling drama to me." Just a few weeks earlier Sybil Bauer, an eighteen-year-old student at Northwestern University, had shocked the world by unofficially breaking the
men's
world record for the 440-yard backstroke. Although the new record was never officially recognized due to the fact she swam in an unsanctioned meet and used the new "alternate arm" backstroke rather than then standard double arm method in which both arms were used in tandem, it nevertheless represented a stunning achievement.

That was part of the reason that Gade Corson's presence in Channel waters had caused so little comment or controversy. Due to the efforts of the WSA, at least as far as the sport of swimming was concerned, women swimmers were no longer a novelty. As one anony mous writer in the
Literary Digest
cautioned at the time, "Masculine holders of championships in athletics, look to your laurels. Sundry members of the so called weaker sex, having obtained the vote and many other things upon which they had set their dear fluttering little hearts, are now out for far bigger game. Frankly, they are making what maybe called Herculean efforts to overcome the vaunted superiority of their brothers."

Everywhere one looked, all of a sudden it seemed as if there was a girl in the water, swimming faster than ever before.

Why should the English Channel be any different?

T
RUDY WAS SO GOOD
it was almost getting monotonous.

After her record-setting performance on Labor Day, Trudy Ederle was still a long, long way from swimming the English Channel, although she may have started entertaining the notion as she shared space on the sports page the next day with Charles Toth, who had just become the third man to swim the Channel that summer, and the fifth of all time. But for the next year and a half, all she did was swim and win, at any distance, under any conditions, against any competition, setting world records with nearly every breath and kick. Fifty yards in an indoor pool against the world record holder? Check. One hundred and twenty yards in an outdoor pool in Bermuda against Britain's best swimmers? Check. A half mile in an ocean pool? Check. With the wind in her face? Check. When she was sick? Check. In Boston? Check. When it was hot? In Indianapolis? Honolulu? Bermuda? Over four hundred meters, the quarter mile, the half mile, in a relay, in a sixty-foot pool, over 50 yards, 100, 120, 150, 200, 400, a half mile, in a handicap, giving every other swimmer a head start? Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. "Ederle Sets World Record" became as common a headline in the sports pages as "Ruth Hits Home Run."

Few athletes of any kind and of any gender have ever dominated a sport the way Trudy Ederle did from the fall of 1922 through the summer of 1924—she held virtually every imaginable women's world record in swimming at distances that ranged from fifty yards to one mile, losing only twice—each time to teammate Helen Wainwright, and even then she defeated Wainwright in a later rematch. The few records she did not hold were only because she had failed to swim those distances under the particular set of conditions required—such as swimming one hundred yards in a seventyfive-foot pool, as opposed to a sixty- or one-hundred-foot pool—or, as in her Labor Day swim, when race officials had failed to time her.

In male sporting terms she was Tiger Woods, Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, Lance Armstrong, and Michael Phelps all rolled into one, her only possible female equivalents such legends as Babe Didrikson, Annika Sorenstam, and Martina Navratilova. But when one considers that Trudy was as successful swimming sprints as she was long distances, her performance is more impressive than that of any of these other athletes. It was as if the world record holder in the 100-meter sprint was simultaneously the world champion in the quarter mile, mile, and 10, 000-meter steeplechase, and winner of the Boston Marathon, and that most of those marks had been set in the same race.

Under the tutelage of Louis Handley, using and perfecting the American crawl, for nearly two years Trudy Ederle hardly knew how to lose. The only thing that stopped her was the ice—she wasn't quite as good swimming indoors in the winter, which sometimes gave her opponents a slim chance at victory; but outdoors in the open ocean she played the sleek porpoise to their meandering turtle.

When Trudy's parents returned to New York from their extended visit to Germany just a few weeks after her Labor Day victory, they discovered that their daughter was a star.

They were not completely surprised by her accomplishments, for they had been kept informed of her remarkable performances by letters and cables and were aware of the notoriety she had gained. Still, it was not until they returned to New York that they realized just what that meant and how much their lives—and hers—had changed. In only a few short months she had gone from a complete unknown to a young woman many New Yorkers now felt that they knew—and cared about.

She didn't just belong to her family anymore, but also to the WSA, to the women and young girls who looked up to her as an example of what a woman could achieve, and to all New Yorkers, who loved to tout the accomplishments of their own. In her own neighborhood Trudy was a star, and the Ederles' retail butcher shop became an impromptu salon for neighbors to discuss her accomplishments and find out when she was competing next. Elsewhere in New York, when Trudy walked down the street, strangers started to point and whisper.

In an era in which the very notion of being a celebrity was still newly minted, Trudy was one of the first. America had never really had a female athletic hero before. Other WSA swimmers, like Thelda Bleibtrey, had their careers end just as they began to reach success, and tennis champ Helen Wills, who would soon become the women's national champion, was still a schoolgirl. French tennis star Suzann Lenglen, although wildly popular in France, was little known in the United States. Women had yet to compete in track and field, and other sports that later came to be identified with female athletes, such as figure skating, as yet had little popular appeal or public profile.

There was only Trudy. Never again would her life be hers alone. At a time when most other girls her age were still in school, Trudy, for all intents and purposes, was now a full-time swimmer. Although she still detested indoor work, by now the WSA had secured a pool in Manhattan, on Fifty-fifth Street, and she no longer had to make the long jaunt to Brooklyn just to practice.

Significantly, Ederle had the full support of her family. Her father, in particular, burst with pride at his daughter's accomplishments and accompanied her to nearly every meet. Since she had already stopped going to school and the Ederles were well off, there was no pressure on Trudy to work or otherwise support the family apart from her household chores. Nothing stood in the way of her swimming career. She turned her life over to the WSA, to Charlotte Epstein and Lou Handley.

But
everyone
wanted her. The British Amateur Swimming Association extended an invitation to the WSA to send a team to Bermuda in October 1922 to participate in a water carnival in the new natatorium at the Hotel St. George, but the invitation was just a veiled excuse to get a look at Trudy Ederle, the girl who had beaten Hilda James so badly. The WSA accepted, and to no surprise Trudy collected another set of records, a performance that earned an invitation from a British promoter who wanted Trudy and Helen Wainwright to tour Europe the following summer and swim in nearly two dozen events all over Europe.

That was the first sign of what would soon become a larger conflict between the WSA and the AAU, both of which were beginning to battle for control over the young swimming star. She was a valuable property in terms of both publicity and real dollars. While the WSA accepted the invitation almost immediately, the AAU withheld approval.

All the while Trudy kept her head down in the water and focused on swimming. With each new victory she seemed to thrive, becoming ever more dedicated as each win built upon the next, and the approval she received from everyone—Meg, Handley, her parents, and other swimmers in the WSA—increased. The Olympics were only two years distant and provided Trudy with a goal beyond the pursuit of records. Now she could swim for the approval of an entire nation.

In 1923 she picked up right where she had left off in 1922. In a year in which Trudy, like a boxer taking on all comers, seemed to set a record every few weeks, one performance stood out from all the others.

Near the end of the summer season, on September 3, she participated in yet another water carnival at the Olympic baths, a sixty-foot pool in Long Beach on Long Island. For once she actually had some competition: Johnny Weissmuller.

Weissmuller, like Trudy, was of German heritage, born in what is now Romania in what was then Austria-Hungary, in 1904. In 1905 he immigrated to the United States with his parents, living first in western Pennsylvania before the family finally settled in Chicago, where his father ran a bar and worked in a brewery and his mother worked as a cook. Weissmuller learned to swim in Lake Michigan, eventually joining the YMCA swim team and becoming a junior champion. At age seventeen he began to work with famed swim coach William Bachrach at the Illinois Athletic Club and in 1921 began to compete in AAU-sanctioned races.

He was, in many ways, the male swimming equivalent of Trudy Ederle, with one exception: Weissmuller, from the time he first started swimming competitively as a young boy, never, ever lost a freestyle race, not even once. He explained his success nonchalantly, saying, "I could make good time because I was so long and skinny, shooting through the water like a stick," but his physical skills were matched by unparalleled determination and a competitive instinct that refused to admit—or allow—defeat. He burst upon the national scene in the summer of 1922 when he set the men's record in the 100-meter freestyle, and for the next two years he grappled Trudy Ederle for his share of the headlines.

Weissmuller, charismatic and already movie-star handsome, would prove to be of benefit to Trudy's career. He made swimming even more popular and brought even more attention to the sport in the mainstream press, thereby helping to make Trudy Ederle a household name as well. By the summer of 1923 half of America was already gaga over Weissmuller. He'd been ill, and for a time doctors feared heart trouble. They were wrong, but that just made Weissmuller more heroic and more popular.

He was also a cogent observer of Trudy Ederle, once noting, "She has such powerful arms and shoulders that she gets practically ninety-nine percent of her propelling progress out of them—she swims more with her arms and less with her feet than any other swimmer I know...[her] feet are nothing but trailers ... I believe she could swim just as fast with her feet tied together."