Today in 1926, American Gertrude Ederle swam from France to England, a record-setting crossing of the English Channel.
And she made that crossing in stormy weather!
Ederle was born in 1906 in New York City, the child of German immigrants.
She was a pretty serious introvert as a kid, possibly in part because of a childhood case of measles that left her with severe hearing loss.
Two of her favorite outlets were books and swimming, especially swimming off the New Jersey coast.
Ederle was talented and driven in the water; she won her first race at age 15.
By age 19 she had set dozens of swimming records.
She competed at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, where she won a gold medal and two bronze medals (and reportedly considered that disappointing!)
She then turned her attention to what was in that time an even bigger challenge: swimming the English Channel.
The stretch between southern England and northern France is 21 miles at its narrowest, and the current doesn’t always allow swimmers to take that route.
Captain Matthew Webb became the first person to swim the Channel in 1875, and only four other men had ever made it across by the time Ederle set her sights on the crossing.
The general attitude of the time was that this was something a woman just couldn’t do.
In fact, Ederle was convinced her coach threw in the towel on her first Channel attempt in 1925, because he didn’t want her to succeed!
For take two, though, she would not be turned back, even by the weather.
After she set off from northern France, rain started falling and the wind picked up so much that the captain of a support ship was worried for the safety of the boat, let alone the swimmer it was there to help.
Someone shouted out to Ederle that she should probably get out of the water.
She shouted back “What for?” and kept on swimming until she reached England.
Her time: 14 hours, 31 minutes.
Not only had she done what many people believed a woman couldn’t do, she did it almost two hours faster than any man up to that point.
Ederle became a worldwide sensation: she got a ticker-tape parade in New York City, then-President Calvin Coolidge called her quote “America’s best girl,” and her success encouraged other women to get involved in sports.
She found she didn’t love all that attention and lived a mostly quiet life for the rest of her 98 years, sometimes teaching Deaf kids to swim.
The “Queen of the Waves” never competed again, but by then she’d proven herself plenty.
This is International Clown Week.
And if you’re celebrating, you might want to drop by Plainview, Nebraska, home to the Klown Doll Museum.
A local Chamber of Commerce employee started decorating the office with clown dolls, other people started sending in dolls too, and a collection was born.
The museum has over 7,000 now, which may be good or may be nightmare fuel.
The First Woman to Brave the English Channel (Outside)
The Klown Doll Museum Is One of the Strangest Places You Can Go in Nebraska (Only In Nebraska)
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Photo by Bain News Service, United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division, via Wikicommons
