Chapter 2 Water Babies-2

In 1878, the Royal Navy, for the first time, required all seamen to know how to swim. And more than two millennia after Vegetius’s attempt to steer armed soldiers through the water, a French cavalry officer named Vicomte de Courtivron figured out how to keep their powder dry. He invented a steel helmet with special clamps to grip the butt end of a rifle and a hook to fasten the trigger guard. Since the helmet was perched on the soldier’s head, and since that head would best remain out of the water to inhale oxygen, the ingenious design also protected the bayonet and the cartridges.
M. de Courtivron demonstrated his headgear in the Seine one day, entering the river in full infantry garb, then loading and firing his weapon fourteen times despite the swift current. At least one newspaper called the exercise an “aquatic feat” and paired it with a report about two unadorned swimmers covering fifteen miles in Liverpool. The era of water spectacles had emerged, and the public thirst was unquenchable. London audiences flocked to the Thames to cheer on fourteen-year-old Agnes Beckwith, who was from a celebrated swimming family, as she churned through five miles of unfriendly waters from London Bridge to Greenwich in just over one hour, seven minutes—a new record. Another young female swimmer demolished her time several days later. At the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties, teenage star Elise Wallenda, of the Flying family, stayed submerged for four minutes and forty-five seconds in a glass-fronted tank, during which time she also undressed, wrote on a slate, sewed, and ate grapes. “There is one great objection to this feat,” wrote an observer, “and that is the exceedingly grave liability to serious or fatal injury.” Young Ms. Wallenda emerged unconscious but was revived. An Italian who billed himself only as Succi epitomized the extreme lengths to which swimmers would go to please their hydrophilic fans. He fasted for weeks and on at least one occasion then went to the Royal Aquarium to swim. So did his followers, to watch. Swimming was not only in but inane.

The bar was raised even further in 1875, when a stocky British sea captain named Matthew Webb, a self-described water lover who had read with interest the accounts of Byron’s adventure across the Hellespont, swam what was considered unswimmable: the English Channel. The twenty-one-mile corridor between England and France was the biggest prize of all, the Mount Everest of the swimming world. Caesar had sailed it in 55 CE, bringing swimming and public baths to the British Isles. Now Webb crossed in the other direction, using the then-popular breaststroke to become an international star. In twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes—a grueling grind in egg-beater, grey-green water with inhuman tides that increased his distance to thirty-nine miles—Webb conquered not just the Channel but every famous swimmer before him. Punch, the British humor magazine, celebrated his success with a neat pun:

Hurrah for daring Captain Webb,

that resolute Commander!

He has far outdone Lord Byron,

Mr. Ekenhead, and Leander.

As for Leander, now his fame must

sink to nearly zero;

For what is he compared with Webb—

who’s in himself a Hero?

Webb’s accomplishment seared his name onto the English consciousness and drew an eager crowd to every public bath. Boys across England clamored for swimming lessons and then swarmed into its ponds and streams. By the time the sport debuted in the first modern Olympics, in 1896, champion swimmers were celebrities, and the sport had exceeded its origins. 

The United States cannonballed in during the twentieth century. The appeal of swimming had spread in ever-widening ripples, from the soft-sand beaches of the Northeast to the palm-shaded turquoise of Florida and Southern California. Coney Island and Atlantic City were resorts, not just swimming holes, with live bands to swim by. Municipal pools made swimming available to the masses; exotic designs became Hollywood luxuries. And a nineteen-year-old New Yorker with a slick crawl and a winning grin swept swimming into the stratosphere. In 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel, setting a speed record for both genders. She was such a phenomenon, in Manhattan, 2 million people turned out for the biggest ticker tape parade the city had seen. Across the country, more than 60,000 women earned swimming certificates from the American Red Cross.

A new wave of American athletic stars floodlit popular culture: Johnny Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe, Esther Williams, Eleanor Holm. They smashed world swimming records and then lit up the silver screen. Aquacades—a new word for a splashy new form of entertainment—enchanted millions of Americans, with superstar swimmers appearing on stage behind curtains of water.

“Swimming was the most popular recreational activity in America in the 1920s and 1930s,” explains Bruce Wigo, president and CEO of the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “And the most popular attraction at many amusement parks was the swimming pool.” I have traveled here to see what is arguably the best collection of swimming memorabilia in the country. Wigo, whose lifeguard looks and wavy blond hair reflect his background as a competitive swimmer and water polo executive, riffles through a box full of old color postcards illustrating outdoor pools and indoor tanks literally swarming with swimmers. “Look at this one—4,000 people a day! And this—2 million gallons of water! They were immense aquatic playgrounds.” He eagerly steers me through the exhibits in a two-story shrine to the world of water. It includes medals, images, and detailed accounts of the sport’s stars, as well as historic bits of swimming gear: a pair of leather goggles more suitable for a motorcycle than the sea; the corner commemorating Olympian Duke Kahanamoku, complete with Hawaiian shirt and lei; a progression of bathing costumes including Ederle’s two-piece silk (with an American flag over the heart) that she wore in the Channel; and a contemporary, cover-all pink burquini.

    Wigo’s personal passion for swimming is sated during daily swims in the ocean outside his office door, where the water registers a perfect 82 degrees on the day I join him. It is one of many swimming interviews I find myself doing, an unconventional but idyllic setting where your memory has to be really good. Wigo’s powerful crawl is an inspiration; his love of the sea palpable. “You jump in the water and feel as if you’re in a different world,” he explains. “You have no gravity. You put your head under water, and you have no sound. I swim with sea turtles and fish, and every once in a while I see a giant something-or-other swim by. There’s something spiritual about it: you get in there, and everything on land disappears. You can think. There’s no distractions.” Later, over coffee at a nearby restaurant, he elaborates. “This,” he says, indicating the canned music in the background, “this is Orwellian. Everywhere there’s music. Is it to keep you from thinking?” I ask what he thinks about in the water. “I solve the problems of the world, work and of my family,” he says.

One of those problems concerns the other side of the swimming story as it unfolded in the United States.

“Before the Civil War, more blacks than white people swam. But when whites discovered swimming, blacks were totally excluded from safe beaches and America’s pools,” Wigo says, incensed. “And white culture fought against the integration of swimming pools more than almost any other thing.” He reminds me of the ugly incidents and vicious riots during decades of segregation, the laws and the bigotry that kept everyone who wasn’t white out of the water. Rather than comply with integration, many pools simply closed.

       A movement to build “colored” pools—bluntly advertised in a 1940 “Learn to Swim” poster for the New York City Department of Parks separating dark-skinned swimmers from their white peers—was, according to Wigo, “a last-ditch effort to provide ‘separate but equal’ facilities.” It was also too late. “By that time the aquatic culture of the black community had been destroyed.” Generations of African Americans grew up with no tradition of swimming. As a result, “the most common black stereotype is, they can’t swim. Talk to a black kid on swimming teams. What do his black friends think of him? That he’s ‘acting white.’”

Several prominent efforts are under way to reverse the trend. Bruce Wigo makes the pitch with his museum, going out of his way to invite African American tourists to see exhibits illustrating the rich history of black swimmers and the many incidents where slaves with fine strokes rescued their nonswimming masters after a shipwreck.

He’s also pushing for more public swimming pools to replicate the giant social centers that once captivated Americans. “People built their own pools, in their own backyards or at private clubs, so they wouldn’t have to associate with someone they didn’t like,” he says. And when the public pools closed down, “they were replaced by fifty-meter lap pools, where the sole purpose was to swim competitively. All the social attractions and elements, like slides, restaurants, dance floors and artificial beaches were engineered out of them, thereby ensuring that nonswimmers—code word for minorities—would not find them attractive or inviting. Thus swimming has remained a mostly white activity.” Water parks, he says, don’t teach people how to swim. He wants the swimming culture to be reborn. Not such a far-fetched image when you recognize that to many, water is sacred. “There’s baptism; there’s the Greek tomb of the diver,” Wigo says. “That’s how you pass into the next world. Water is always associated with rebirth.”

So we’re at it again, reinventing swimming for another age, using a metaphor that is entirely appropriate.

You Know You’re a Swimmer If. . . .

•You’re crossing a bridge and think, “I could swim across this. . . .”

•People ask you to do a triathlon, and you say you would if it weren’t for the run and bike parts.

•You put off the decision to color your hair until after the summer swimming season.

•A hotel/casino in Vegas sends you an email entitled “FLY BACK FREE,” and you think they are having some kind of swimming event, only to click on it to see that they are offering to FLY you BACK home FREE.

•You have more swimsuits hanging in your closet than dresses.

•You keep an emergency Swim Bag in your car just in case you pass a pool on the way home.

•You can’t remember the last time that you took a shower at home.

•Bugs die of chlorine poisoning when they land on your skin.

•You say to your dog, “Wanna go for a swim?” and she gets more excited than an offering of a walk.

•You find yourself counting strokes instead of sheep to fall asleep at night. Then, just when you’re about to fall asleep, instead of your leg twitching a little bit, it does a full whip kick, and you ride the glide to slumberland.

•You get in the water and feel like an eagle in the sky.

—from a series of posts on a US Masters Swimming online forum