CHADWICK, Florence May

(b. 9 November 1918 in San Diego, California; d. 15 March 1995 in San Diego, California), persevering long-distance swimmer who became one of the most famous female athletes of the twentieth century.

Chadwick was one of two children of Richard William Chadwick, who, after retiring from a twenty-three-year-long career in the San Diego police department as a detective and narcotics agent, operated a restaurant with his wife, Mary Chadwick.

Chadwick's swimming career began early. She was taught to swim by an uncle but lost her first contest at the age of six, coming in last. "I can still remember the humiliation I felt but it only made me want to win more than ever," she later commented.

Chadwick graduated from Point Loma Junior and Senior High Schools in San Diego in 1936, then attended San Diego State College. She went on to Southwestern University of Law in Los Angeles, California, then to Balboa Law School and Dickenson Business College, both in San Diego. Chadwick appeared in aquatic shows, was a swimming instructor, gave celebrity endorsements, and in 1944 appeared in the movie musical Bathing Beauty.

Years earlier, at the tender age of ten, Chadwick was inspired by the record-setting feats of Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. It was this inspiration that led to Chadwick's greatest triumph: swimming the channel on 8 August 1950 in the record time of thirteen hours and twenty minutes—one hour and eleven minutes faster than Ederle had.

The preparation for this triumph had not been easy. After a long and varied swimming career, Chadwick worked for an American oil company in Saudi Arabia, saving the $5,000 needed to enter the contest. She practiced long hours in the Persian Gulf, and when she took to the French waters of Cape Gris-Nez at 2:37 that August morning, the five foot, six inch swimmer weighed in at 141 pounds. As she swam toward England, her father, officials, and friends accompanied her in a fishing boat.

Throughout the swim Chadwick nibbled on sugar cubes and fluctuated her number of strokes per minute to help conserve her energy. For four hours she had to overcome the obstacle of an ebb tide encountered three miles out. Fortunately for her, British artillery in the area had been suspended. After making it to England, she commented nonchalantly to the reporters on shore, "I feel fine. I am quite prepared to swim back." She did swim back, but not until the next year.

On 10 and 11 September 1951 Chadwick performed the England to France crossing, a much more difficult task, becoming the first woman swimmer to cross the English Channel in both directions. She and her father waited for eleven weeks in a seaside hotel while she strengthened herself with a calorie-rich diet. Finally she decided to brave foggy waters and unfavorable tides and embarked upon her swim, which this time would take her from Dover, England, to Cape Gris-Nez in France. After sixteen hours and twenty-two minutes of arduous swimming (made even worse by the choking fumes from an accompanying motorboat), Chadwick landed at Sangatte, three miles south of the French seaport of Calais. But her conquest of the English Channel did not end there. On 4 September 1953 she again went from England to France, this time in fourteen hours and forty-two minutes. Two years later on 12 October 1955, when she was thirty-six-years-old, she crossed the channel in thirteen hours and fifty-five minutes.

Other aquatic achievements by Chadwick include swimming across the San Diego Bay Channel at age ten, an unprecedented feat by a child of that age; winning the annual 2.5-mile race at La Jolla, California, ten times; breaking a record when she covered the twenty-one miles from Catalina Island to the California mainland in thirteen hours and forty-seven minutes on 21 September 1952; conquering the Strait of Gibraltar between Spain and Africa on 20 September 1953 in five hours and six minutes; completing a round-trip across the Bosporus between Europe and Asia on 7 October 1953 in a little over an hour and fourteen minutes; and setting her fourth record in five weeks on 9 October 1953, crossing the Turkish Dardanelles (a narrow strait also known as Hellespont) in less than two hours. Chadwick received the Helms Athletic Foundation Award as athlete of the month for August 1950; was named to the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1970; received the Living Legacy Award and induction into the San Diego Hall of Champions, both in 1984; and was inducted into the International Women's Sports Hall of Fame in 1996. Her hometown threw a ticker-tape parade in her honor in 1950, and a white-tipped dahlia was named for her.

For quite a while Chadwick was the world's highest-paid woman athlete. She founded swimming schools named for her in New York, New Jersey, and California and was the aquatic director at Grossinger's, a famous resort in New York State. At the age of fifty, in San Diego, she embarked upon a successful career as a stockbroker, which she pursued for the next two and a half decades. Chadwick died in San Diego on 15 March 1995 after a long unspecified illness. She was never married and had no children.

Extraordinarily good looking with large, lustrous, dark eyes and a flashing smile, Chadwick was called "the most beautiful woman in sports" by Gypsy Rose Lee, an entertainer and a beauty in her own right. Johnny Weissmuller, an Olympic swimming champion and film star, said she was "the greatest woman swimmer of all time—maybe of either sex—and it's time she got credit for it." But it is in her own words that she is best summed up: "Life seems so much simpler swimming. The experience must be similar to that of a flyer above the clouds by himself. I am also in my own little world out there.… If I had a chance to relive my life, I would do it all again because it is trying to do what you badly want to do that counts."

Biographical sketches of Chadwick are featured in Current Biography (1950, 1995); Encyclopedia of World Biography (1998); and Women in World History (1999). Entries on Chadwick are also in David L. Porter, Biographical Dictionary of American Sports: Basketball and Other Indoor Sports (1989); Ralph Hickok, A Who's Who of Sports Champions (1995); Joe Layden, Women in Sports (1997); and Janet Woolum, Outstanding Women Athletes (1998). Articles on the swimmer's channel crossings include "Channel Challengers," Newsweek (21 Aug. 1950), "Two Girls in Swimming," Time (21 Aug. 1950), and "Wrong Way Swimmer," Time (24 Sept. 1951). Elizabeth Witty, "Chadwick Out of Water but Still 'Swimming,'" Futures (Oct. 1986), deals with her post-swimming career. An obituary is in the New York Times (19 Mar. 1995).

Dorothy L. Moran