This is a menu of the topics on this page (click on any): Investor's Business Daily, May 24, 2000, By Susan Vanghn    The New York Times Book Review, June 18, 2000, By Denise Grady    The New York Times, April 30, 2001, by Elliott Denman    Obituary December 1, 2003, By Polly Anderson, The Associated Press    Obituary, New York Times, December 1, 2003, By Richard Severo   .

Investor's Business Daily, May 24, 2000, By Susan Vanghn

Gertrude Ederle sobbed bitterly as her swimming coach, Jabez Wolffe, pulled her out of the freezing waters of the English Channel on August 18, 1925.

Had the 19-year-old Ederle, a New York resident, been able to make just seven more miles, she'd have become the first woman to have completed the grueling 21-mile swim from France to England.

But Wolffe, who had tried more than 20 times to conquer the Channel himself, believed Ederle was too nauseated to continue. His grabbing her disqualified her instantly. Ederle 's long-held dream was lost. The sponsorship money raised by the New York Women's Swimming Association had been spent in vain. And the callous international press, which had boisterously asserted that no female could swim the Channel, gloated saucily.

Hundreds had attempted the arduous Channel swim before Ederle. Only five men had made it all the way. What Mount Everest was to climbers, the English Channel was to long-distance swimmers. Its cold waters were subject to powerful currents, wind and fog. It brimmed with jellyfish and Portuguese men-of-war and occasionally was visited by sharks.

If this weren't enough, the Channel was the world's busiest shipping lane, so swimmers had to watch out for giant freighters that might suddenly overtake them.

After Ederle's aborted Channel swim, she returned to America shaken but not defeated. She spent the next few months plotting a new attempt. How could she raise enough money when sponsors would be reluctant to support a second attempt? Most important, what, if anything, could she do differently to turn her failure into success?

1. Ederle hired Thomas Burgess as her new swimming coach. He was one of the five men who'd made it across the Channel, although it took him 14 tries. She realized that Burgess''victory gave him an understanding that only four other swimmers in the world possessed. (Should be: Burgess's victory)

2. Yet even with Burgess'expert guidance, Ederle knew she'd have to build mental toughness for her rematch against the sea. She needed to eliminate defeating memories of her last swim and muster as much encouragement as she could from family, friends and supporters. (Space needed)

The young swimmer also planned a bold departure from tradition -- one that startled and amused sports writers. Although all five men who'd successfully swum the channel employed the breaststroke, Ederle had decided to try a new stroke called the crawl.

Lastly, there was the question of money. The Chicago Tribune syndicate offered to finance Ederle's second attempt to return for an exclusive story. But if Ederle (who'd won three medals in the 1924 Olympics) accepted the paper's offer, she'd lose her amateur status and not be able to compete in the Olympics -- or any other amateur competition -- again.

3. Ederle decided to go for it. On August 6, 1926, she put on an outfit designed for her by her most faithful supporter -- her older sister, Margaret -- consisting of a red bathing cap, two-piece bathing suit and goggles. Slathering herself with lanolin, petrolatum, olive oil and lard to protect against jellyfish and cold, Ederle encountered the 61-degree water at Cape GrisNez, France, at about 7 a.m. London bookies had set a 5-1 odds against her. (Space needed)

On the tug Alsace were Ederle's father and sister, her new coach and a gaggle of supporters. Photographers and journalist followed on a second boat.

To keep her spirits up and stay focused on her goal -- which could take hours to achieve -- Ederle used humor. When she found herself anxious or stroking too fast, she sang "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" and set her strokes to the song's waltzing beat. When the weather turned fierce and 20-foot swells began to batter her, she combated her fears by listening to reporters' off-key renditions of "Yes We Have No Bananas" and "East Side, West Side."

4. Hours into the swim, Ederle's left leg grew numb, an she had trouble kicking. The sea swells and currents had become so powerful that, for every yard she progressed, she was pushed back two. Both her father and coach leaned over the boat and pleaded with her: "You must come out." (Should be: and)

But this time, Ederle remained in control. "No, no," she shouted back." "What for?" And she kept swimming. She decided she would finish the swim or drown.

At 9:40 p.m., after more than 14 hours, Ederle reached the shores of Kingsdown, England, where hundreds of people holding flares had gathered to cheer her. Ederle had beaten the men's record by more than two hours. Her record would stand for 24 years.

Later, experts estimated that, because of the rough waters, Ederle had swum 35 miles to cross the Channel's 21-mile width, notes David Adler in "America's Champion Swimmer: Gertrude Ederle."

Her victory had momentous repercussions. Citing her as their inspiration, more than 60,000 women earned American Red Cross swimming certificates during the 1920s.

Ederle developed her "don't quit" philosophy as a child after a near-fatal drowning accident. While visiting her grandmother in Germany, 8-year-old Ederle tumbled into a pond and had to be rescued. The mishap frightened her terribly, but also motivated her to learn to swim. Her father tethered Ederle to a rope, and shouted encouragement as she awkwardly attempted to dog paddle in a river near the family's New Jersey summer cottage.

With her father's encouragement, Ederle soon mastered swimming. She practiced diligently, and in a few months could outswim her peers. Once, after she'd joined the Women's Swimming Association in New York, a competing swimmer mocked the way Ederle was practicing a new stroke. Ederle refused to change her technique or feel the criticism's sting. She just practiced harder -- and used the new stroke to beat the girl.

Her strategy helped her set 29 U.S. and world swimming records.

"When somebody tells me I cannot do something, that's when I do it," the 93-year-old Ederle recently told a New Jersey newspaper reporter at her nursing home in Wyckoff, N.J. where swimming certificates and old photos line the walls of her room.

"Oh, it was a good life," Ederle said. "I was very happy when I was swimming. I could have gone on and on."

In August 1926, fighting rain, high winds and 20-foot waves, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel, Ederle, just 19, already held three Olympic medals and had set 29 American and world records. Her time for the channel, 14 hours 31 minutes, beat the men's record by nearly two hours and remained the women's record for 35 years.

David A. Adler's America's Champion Swimmer: Gertrude Ederle (Gulliver Books/Harcourt, $16; ages 5 to 9), illustrated with richly colored acrylic paintings by Terry Widener, captures the highlights of Ederle's life in evocative images and telling details that will appeal to children. Widener's stylized, muscular figures, reminiscent of the American Scene art of Ederle's era, gain charm with each reading even though he paints Ederle with thunder thighs and dainty shoulders that are surely the reverse of a swimmer's proportions.

In a method not described in any Red Cross manual, Ederle's father taught her to swim when she was 7 or 8 by tossing her into a river with a rope about her waist and ordering her to paddle. Within a few years she was winning medals. At the finish of her storm-tossed channel swim, thousands of people gathered on the coast in Kingsdown, England, to guide her ashore with flares and bonfires.

What power Ederle had; what a joy it must have been to see her in the water.

This book, though engaging, does not quite bring her to life. The prose falls flat, or veers off into the language of a juvenile feminist tract. Ederle's own voice is missing. Adler looks at her from a distance, as if she were a historic figure, even though she is still alive, and in January, at 93, was well enough to be interviewed by a reporter.

Older children will appreciate the details included in the author's notes at the end of the book: Ederle might have crossed the channel four hours faster had the weather been clear, and she lost much of her hearing after her swim.

Her determination served her well seven years later when she fell, injuring her spine, and was not expected to walk again. She recovered after spending more than four years in a cast, and went on to become a dress designer and a swimming teacher for deaf children.

Ederle, who is known as Trudy, has lived much of a now lonely life far from the big, bold headlines she once commanded and the newsreel features she dominated nearly three- quarters of a century ago. The world may have forgotten about Ederle, but to Ederle, her moments of glory seem not too many yesterdays ago.

"Oh, I've got pretty good memories," she said recently, chuckling to a visitor at the Christian Health Care Center. And a pretty good singing voice, too, which she revealed as she spun off the lyrics to "Trudy," the 1926 song about her that was attributed to Irving Berlin but was actually written by Charles Tobias and Al Sherman.

Tears began to well in her eyes as she sang the final bars.

The visions the song conjured seemed so real, and so recent. She may be the last surviving member of what some term the Golden Age of Sport. With all due credit to Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Billie Jean King, Wilma Rudolph, Peggy Fleming and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Ederle's feat was among the most significant in women's sports history.

On Aug. 6, 1926, turbulent waters and brutal tide conditions in the Channel pushed the 19-year-old Ederle far off course, and she wound up swimming nearly 35 miles, far longer than the actual distance of 21 miles as the gull flies and far longer than she had planned. But Ederle battled to complete her crossing in 14 hours 31 minutes. Not only was Ederle the first woman to conquer the Channel, she also obliterated the previous record of 16:23, set by Sebastian Tirabocchi, an Italian who lived in Argentina, in 1923.

She never really considered her swim a hallmark for women's sports or considered herself a pioneer.

"It was just that everybody was saying it couldn't be done," she said. "Well, every time somebody said that, I wanted to prove it could be done. It took a Yankee to show them how."

When Ederle, a Manhattanite, returned to the city, an estimated two million New Yorkers lined the sidewalks on Aug. 27, 1926, to heap their applause - and tons of confetti - on their favorite daughter. They had appreciated her swimming prowess before. At the Paris Olympic Games of 1924, she won a gold medal as the leadoff swimmer on the United States 4x100-meter freestyle relay - teaming with Euphrasia Donnelly, Ethel Lackie and Mariechen Wehselau to set a world record of 4 minutes 58.8 seconds. She added bronze medals in the 100- and 400-meter freestyle races.

But the Channel swim was something extraordinary. News of her success pushed the stories of Rudolph Valentino's funeral and Jack Dempsey's training for the Gene Tunney fight off many front pages.

Today, other than a handful of friends and staff members at the Christian Health Care Center, there are few to share those memories.

"My sister Margaret died a few months ago and I miss her so much," said Ederle, who never married. "I adored Meg."

It is not only the passage of the years, of family and friends, that shrank her world. In truth, she had precious little time to enjoy her celebrity and her fitness. Mobility has been a major problem for most of her adult life. Deafness, which some ascribed to her Channel swim, plagued her for decades and made her rather reclusive, although she did work with deaf children, teaching them to swim. She was fitted recently with a state-of-the-art device that has greatly improved her hearing.

She toured America's vaudeville stages for a few years after her Channel record, demonstrating her Channel-beating stroke in a specially built swimming tank. She later made cameo appearances at Billy Rose's Aquacade at the New York World's Fair in 1939. But her life began unraveling after the 1933 accident, which occurred at the home of friends in Hempstead, N.Y. For the next four and a half years, she was in a cast and, she said, "the pain has never fully subsided."

It was her sister Meg, she recalled, who got her into the sport.

"Meg, she's the one who actually made me become a swimmer," Ederle said. "I never cared for it, really. I was lazy. I liked to fool around in the water, but I didn't like being serious about it.

"Meg's the one who wanted to make me a champion. I used to get these entry blanks in the mail and tear them up. Meg fished them out and mailed them in."

The Ederle family spent many summers away from the city, vacationing in Highlands, in Monmouth County, N.J. For the young swimmer, it was an ideal location. "I just went out the back door and jumped in the Shrewsbury River," she said. A small park in Highlands is now named in her honor.

She eventually joined the famed Women's Swimming Association of New York and, under the club's banner, began making her mark in amateur competitions. One success led to another and, eventually, to the Paris Olympics.

"We used to get a taxi and go around Paris," she remembered. "We'd stand up and go screaming around the streets. People would say, 'There go the crazy Americans.' We sure did have a lot of fun.

"The Olympic races? I just remember I had to swim like hell."

By the time she quit amateur swimming, she had set 29 world and American records, at distances from 100 to 500 meters.

Again, it was Meg who urged her to try much longer distances.

Helen Wainwright, an Olympic teammate, had originally been the Women's Swimming Association's selection to attempt the Channel swim in 1925. But when Wainwright was injured stepping off a New York trolley, the club turned to Ederle. Her 1925 bid failed. She swallowed too much salt water and began to bring it up; someone in the attending boat grabbed her arm to assist, which led to her disqualification.

"I was really mad, too, because I knew I could make it," she said.

There was no stopping her a year later.

Wearing a revolutionary two-piece bathing suit and personally designed wraparound goggles, which were kept watertight with molten candle wax, she waded into the water off Cap Gris-Nez, France, just after 7 a.m. Aug. 6, 1926. Once under way, she stuck to the basic crawl stroke and stroked on and on. Beef broth and cold chicken were her only nourishment.

Frequently, she said, those in the accompanying tugboat asked, "Do you want to come out, Trudy?"

"And I always answered, 'What for?' " she said, explaining that What For? then became another nickname.

With nightfall descending, she approached the English coast and finally set foot on the beach at Kingsdown, near Deal.

"When I walked out of the water, I began thinking, 'Oh my God, have I really done it?' When my feet hit the sand, oh, that was a wonderful moment."

A week later, she boarded the Cunard steamship Berengeria to start the voyage home. As the vessel approached New York, she was sent a request.

" 'Miss Ederle, would you please go to the upper deck,' " she recalled being told. " 'The planes want to welcome you. They wanted to drop flowers down.'

"I said, 'You're kidding, aren't you?' " It was not a joke.

"So I went up there," she said. "The planes circled around and swooped down and dropped those bouquets. They were just gorgeous. I never felt anything like that. I was proud, very, very proud, so proud."

Soon it was her turn to meet the multitudes gathered on sidewalks of her city, a heroine come home.

Ms. Ederle had spent the past several years living at the Christian Health Care Center in Wyckoff, N.J., about 25 miles northwest of New York City, said Martin Ward, whose wife is one of Ms. Ederle's 10 surviving nieces and nephews.

In a roaring decade when Americans cheered daredevils, few were as celebrated as Ms. Ederle, who was 20 when she made her historic swim on Aug. 6, 1926.

"People said women couldn't swim the channel," Ms. Ederle said in a 2001 interview marking the 75th anniversary of her feat. "I proved they could."

When she returned to her native land, there were celebrations, receptions and a roaring ticker-tape parade for her in New York, where she was born in 1905. She met President Coolidge, was paid thousands to tour in vaudeville, played herself in a movie ("Swim, Girl, Swim") and had a song and a dance step named for her.

Only five men had succeeded in swimming the channel before her, and she beat the record by more than two hours.

"I thought it was marvelous, and I thought only Gertrude could have done it," another top swimmer from the era, Aileen Riggin Soule, said in a 1999 interview with The Associated Press. "She had the stubbornness."

Ms. Ederle (pronounced ED-er-lee) swam the treacherous stretch under the most adverse conditions, battling rip tides, cross currents, driving rain, mountainous seas and a constant threat of floating debris, poisonous jellyfish and sharks. She left Cape Griz-Nez, France, at 7:05 a.m. and stumbled ashore at Kingsdown, England, 14 hours and 30 minutes later.

Because of the stormy weather, she had swum 35 miles in crossing the 21-mile-wide channel. Yet her time for the crossing stood for 24 years before it was broken in 1950 by Florence Chadwick, who negotiated 23 miles in 13 hours and 20 minutes.

Two tugs accompanied her, one filled with relatives and friends, and the other with reporters and photographers, some of them seasick. A phonograph played lively tunes to buoy her spirit, and those in the boats sang, too.

But Ms. Ederle said her well-wishers needed to be buoyed up more than she did.

"I had to keep joking with them to keep their spirits up," she recalled. "I remember they sang endlessly: 'Let Me Call You Sweetheart,' 'Sweet Rosie O'Grady' and 'After the Ball Is Over.' But when the storm was fiercest, they all looked as if they were going to a funeral. Every time I stopped, they jumped and said, 'What's the matter, Trudy? Everything OK?' "

During some of the toughest moments, her trainer urged her to give up, "but I'd just look at him and say, 'What for?' " she recalled.

At the ticker-tape parade, the crowds shouted, "Hello, Miss What-For!"

She was little affected by the fame that followed. She remained what one writer called her, "an almost old-fashioned girl in a world of flappers." Soule, who toured with Ms. Ederle in a swimming exhibition, recalled her as "a sweet person — thoughtful, kind. She even wrote poetry."

Ms. Ederle was a champion swimmer before her channel swim, holding a string of world records at various distances. At the 1924 Olympics in Paris, she was hobbled by the stress of travel and turned in a disappointing performance — by her standards — of one second-place finish, one third-place finish and a first on a relay team.

In 1925, she swam the 21 miles from the tip of Manhattan to Sandy Hook, N.J., in seven hours, 11-1/2 minutes, bettering the record held by men.

After giving up touring because of the stress, Ms. Ederle fell down a flight of stairs in 1933, injuring her spine. Battling back, she returned to the spotlight at the 1939 World's Fair, swimming in a show at the famous Aquacade.

Her hearing hadn't been good since a childhood bout with the measles, and hours spent in the water aggravated the problem. By the 1940s, she was entirely deaf.

Out of the spotlight, she taught deaf children to swim — "since I can't hear either, they feel I'm one of them" — and participated in some business ventures. Giving few interviews, she lived quietly in Queens for many years.

"I am comfortable and satisfied," Ms. Ederle said in one interview in the 1950s. "I am not a person who reaches for the moon as long as I have the stars. God has been good to me."