NEW YORK — Gertrude Ederle, who was the toast of America and Europe in 1926 when she became the first woman to swim the English Channel, died Sunday. She was 98.
Ederle had spent the last 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 Ederle's 10 surviving nieces and nephews. The exact cause of death was not announced.
In a roaring decade where Americans cheered daredevils, few were as celebrated as Ederle, who was 20 when she made her historic swim on Aug. 6, 1926.
"People said women couldn't swim the channel," Ederle told Associated Press 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 ticker-tape parade for her in New York City, where she was born in 1905, according to the family. She met President Coolidge, was paid thousands of dollars 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. "She had the stubbornness."
Ederle swam the choppy, treacherous stretch under the most adverse conditions, battling riptides, crosscurrents, driving rain and mountainous seas, as well as 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 the equivalent of 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 tugboats accompanied Ederle, one filled with relatives and friends, and the other with reporters and photographers, some of them seasick. A phonograph played lively tunes to lift her spirit, and those riding in the boats sang, too.
But Ederle said her well-wishers needed to be buoyed more than she did.
