Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (50 page)

She briefly emerged in 1930, when Lorena Hopkins, star reporter for the Associated Press and later known as a confidante and possible romantic partner of Eleanor Roosevelt, discovered Trudy teaching swimming at a public pool in Rye, New York.

Apart from her bathing suit, which had her last name stenciled across the back, Trudy was utterly anonymous. Hopkins described her as a "bronzed young woman with a determined grin," but "unless you raise your voice she can not hear you, and looks at you with an expression that has in it embarrassment, bewilderment and fear." When she asked Trudy about her Channel experience, Trudy was brutally frank.

"I'm not sorry I did it. Only—if I'd known how it was going to be, that I'd lose my hearing—I don't think I'd have done it.

"It wasn't worth it."

She was twenty-four years old.

Although Trudy tried to back away from those comments when they appeared in the press, they left the impression that her story was, in the end, a tragedy, a perception that only a few years later nearly became true. In 1933 after moving out of her house and into her own apartment, Trudy fell on some broken tile while walking down the stairs, twisting her spine, leaving her in a cast, periodically bedridden, hobbling around on a cane or with crutches, her legs all but paralyzed, unable to work, and hardly able to stand. No less than nineteen doctors pronounced that she would never swim again or walk with anything approaching normalcy.

But it was swimming, which had both given her everything and taken it away, that ultimately saved her. In 1938 while visiting with her old family doctor, he suggested that she shouldn't just try to walk so she could walk, but walk so she could swim again. She didn't think she could, walking was hard enough, but if she could walk, then she could swim again, so she tried.

At first she could take only a few steps, but over time those few steps became a few yards, then a few dozen, and finally a few blocks and even more. Then, as she later recalled, "I risked a dip in the pool. I told my legs to kick and my arms to beat, and they did ... It was something like swimming the Channel, only harder." Eighteen months later she was swimming well enough to appear in impresario Billy Rose's water show at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The crowd remembered her, and for the first time in more than a decade she could hear them, albeit faintly, cheering for her again.

After swimming the English Channel, Trudy Ederle should have taken her place as one of the foremost athletes of the twentieth century, on par with such luminaries as Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrickson, and other pioneers, the female equivalent of Hillary and Norgay, or Jackie Robinson, yet through no fault of her own—except, perhaps, her own innate shyness and reticence—she was forgotten almost immediately. If there is any continuing tragedy to her story, it is that.

For even as Trudy was fading from memory, due in large part to her effort, women athletes were becoming ever more commonplace and accepted. Just as no one dared question whether African-Americans could compete on an equal footing with white ballplayers after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947, after Trudy swam the Channel no one dared legitimately question whether a woman should swim, or whether it was somehow "proper" anymore for a woman to be an athlete. Of course, that didn't mean that female athletes would find their way easily. Prejudice would prove to be a foe nearly as challenging as the Channel, and the ensuing journey was never an easy undertaking, yet year after year the cause of women's athletics and equality would make slow but steady progress.

Less than two years after Trudy swam the Channel, in the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, American women again dominated the swimming competition, but the rest of the world was rapidly catching up—by then Trudy's mastery of the American crawl had inspired imitators everywhere. Women also competed in track and field for the first time, participating in the 100-meter, 200-meter, and 400-meter runs, the high jump, discus, and 4-by-100-meter relay. There was no turning back. Over time, participation by women in the Olympics only increased, thereby providing an impetus for women to compete elsewhere, until today women can and do compete in every sport imaginable, from baseball to boxing, wrestling, and hockey. And while that undoubtedly would have happened without the efforts of Trudy Ederle, it would not have happened as quickly, nor as confidently, without her. And as a swimmer, she was, truly, extraordinary. She retained the women's record for fastest time across the Channel until 1955, when Florence Chadwick swam the distance in thirteen hours and fifty-five minutes.

And despite what happened in the years immediately following her crossing of the Channel, Trudy Ederle's own life did not end as a tragedy. After she recovered from her back injury she continued to live quietly, eventually sharing a home with two other women in Flushing, Queens, enjoying her nieces and nephews, spending much of her time teaching deaf children to swim, and continuing to swim herself. She made some money endorsing a swimming pool, patented an Ederle doll, and occasionally spoke about telling her story in a book, but she seemed satisfied to be just plain old Aunt Gertrude. She rarely gave interviews, preferred to stay out of the limelight—she'd had enough of that—and was still sensitive about her hearing around strangers, even though modern hearing aids made it possible for her to hear much better than when she was younger. Still, every few years someone would seek her out, and she would reluctantly agree to revisit the past for a while, perhaps even sing a bit of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" or "Yes, We Have No Bananas," or the song called "Trudy" that was written about her shortly after she swam the Channel, which asked, "Tell me, Trudy, who is going to be the lucky one?" But she would always tell the reporters not to write a sob story, never mentioned being poisoned in 1925, and never complained about how others made more money off her achievement than she did, once saying, "I never cared about the commercial part. I was just a young girl."

She was not bitter about her fate but in many ways seemed glad to be forgotten. She was well aware of her role as a pioneer and followed women's swimming and other sports closely, secure in the knowledge that as a nineteen-year-old young woman—swimming the Channel because others didn't think she could, because they'd tried to stop her once before, to make her family and her country proud, and to get that red roadster—that she had done far, far more than swim the Channel. She knew that in all the girls sweating in a gym or doing laps on a track or swimming intervals in a pool, there was at least a bit of Trudy Ederle in each and every one.

Halfway across the Channel, when told to stop and get out of the water, she had asked, "What for?" Over the remainder of her life, before she passed away on November 20, 2003, at the age of ninety-eight, that question was answered each and every day in the achievements of every woman and girl who followed in her wake. One of the reasons Trudy was so quickly forgotten and overlooked is that the changes she inspired took such a strong hold and became so pervasive so quickly. Her achievement was so stunning, so profound, and so unexpected that the momentum of her accomplishment kept shattering stereotypes for decades. Trudy didn't need to be there for that to happen, at the front of the line, breaking down the doors herself time and time again, because she had already blown them away. All other women needed to do was force their way through the opening, to follow Trudy into the water or onto the track, and when told they should stop, ask "What for?" themselves.

In one of her final interviews, Trudy spoke of the feeling that came over her in the water, the feeling she first felt that day in the Highlands off the pier, the feeling that drew her to the Channel and drew her to the seas over and over again.

"Sometimes," she said, "after I've been swimming a few hours, I can feel myself lifting in the water as I come into stride ... At that instant, when I bring myself on top of the water, the memories of what I did, and who I was, start coming back."

Trudy Ederle is still there today, in every woman and in every girl who has ever competed or who has ever wanted to, aiming toward a distant shore, testing herself, a young woman in the sea.

I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for their assistance with this project: editor Susan Canavan, Elizabeth Lee, Beth Burleigh Fuller, Meg Hannah, Patrick Barry, and Brian Moore with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, agent John Taylor Williams and Hope Denekamp of Kneerim and Williams at Fish Richardson, researcher Denise Bousquet, John Dorsey and Aaron Schmidt at the Boston Public Library, Richard Johnson, Howard Bryant, Joe Farara, the New-York Historical Society, and the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

I first encountered the story of Trudy Ederle in 2000 while researching another project and finding myself distracted by accounts of her attempt to swim the English Channel. Despite the fact that I have been writing sports history for more than two decades and have written about notable female athletes such as Eleanora Sears, Louise Stokes, Mia Hamm, Tara Lipinski, and others, I was unfamiliar with Ederle and somewhat mystified by the fact that she was so little known and apparently had been forgotten so easily. In an era in which female athletes from Billie Jean King to Annika Sorenstam and Danica Patrick have tested themselves against men, I found the fact that she had swum the English Channel faster than any man absolutely fascinating, and I filed a few clips away for future reference as I worked to complete other projects. One year later I was further intrigued when I read a brief interview with Gertrude Ederle written by Elliott Denman in the
New York Times
and was surprised to learn that Gertrude Ederle was still alive. At this point I began to consider Ederle and her quest to swim the Channel as a subject for a book—no one to date had ever taken on the subject—but contractual commitments to other projects prevented me from doing so at that time.

Shortly after Gertrude Ederle's death in 2003, as my other commitments came to an end, I began the research that has resulted in this book. I spent much of the next three years accumulating every clipping and article on Miss Ederle that I could find, not only in newspapers, microfilm, and online, but in magazines and serial publications. Once again, my background as a librarian was extremely helpful in ferreting out the most remote sources.

The foundation for this book is the daily newspaper, most notably the
New York Times, New York Herald-Tribune, New York Daily News,
and
Chicago Tribune.
The
Tribune-News
syndicate financed Ederle's second attempt to swim the Channel, and detailed accounts, nearly identical to one another, appeared in both newspapers. Alec Rutherford's sober accounts in the
New York Times
were particularly helpful. Wire reports, which appeared in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, were also valuable, particularly those including reports by the Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service. Such accounts were gleaned from literally hundreds of different newspaper titles, many accessed through
www.newsarchives.com
, which contains no fewer than eight thousand references to either Gertrude or Trudy Ederle. Unless otherwise indicated, these clippings—which number more than six thousand separate stories and reports—served as my primary source material for the writing of
Young Woman and the Sea.

Trudy Ederle belongs to another time, when newspaper and sports journalism were far different from what they are today, when the never-ending twenty-four-hour news cycle makes celebrities of athletes who have yet to accomplish much of anything. When Trudy Ederle was swimming competitively, from about 1920 through 1926, swimming, particularly women's swimming, was still something of a fringe sport. Most swim meets in which she participated were covered in cursory fashion, as newspapers rarely did more than list the results. Even as Trudy became one of the most accomplished swimmers in history, setting record after record, she was never really the subject of in-depth, personality-based profiles. The
New York Times,
for instance, despite publishing more than seven hundred articles that mention Trudy, published no more than a handful of stories that one might reasonably term a feature about her. Such portraits simply weren't done then. Even the few magazine stories written about her at the time were hardly comprehensive, and although she was the subject of numerous such stories later in her life, Ederle herself shied away from the spotlight. Shy by nature and made even more so by her hearing trouble, she rarely gave lengthy interviews and tended to tell the same few anecdotes over and over again. As a result most previous accounts of her career are little more than thumbnail reports, few of which provided much detailed information and many of which inadvertently repeat factual errors.

The task of any biographer is to create a three-dimensional, nuanced, and accurate portrait of a subject, and I have been fortunate that it was still possible to accomplish this through the close reading of so many disparate pieces of information. Trudy's story is told from the accumulation of data, from facts gleaned from an enormous variety of sources, including not only the thousands of newspaper and magazine stories discussed above, but the oral histories of fellow swimmers and residents of the Highlands, official Olympic reports, a wide variety of reference works available both in print and online, accounts of Channel swims by other swimmers, period swimming manuals, photographs, films, official weather reports, and other sources. It is for this reason that I chose not to provide detailed notes required by an academic study. In many instances, the information contained in a single sentence was gleaned from a half-dozen sources—detailed footnoting would not only be unwieldy but, I fear, prove to be confusing and to obscure as much as it revealed. Instead I have opted to create a brief bibliography of those sources that were most significant to this account, and provide a chapter-by-chapter discussion of those individual sources I found most valuable.