Swims

Guzzling orange juice, milk and broth, munching chocolate, losing 17 pounds, Henry F. Sullivan of Lowell, Mass., swam from Santa Catalina Island to the California mainland last week in 22 hours, 45 minutes. He had previously failed to finish in William Wrigley Jr.'s $25,000 nautical derby over the same course which 17-year-old George Young of Toronto completed in 15 hr. 44 min. (TIME, Jan. 24).

Five dawns later, a large woman floundered stupidly in the tide-rips off Point Vicente. She had been swimming all night. Her breast and left arm had been lacerated by a savage barracuda./- For a quarter of an hour, while her body lolled like a dying squid, she babbled idly among the waves. From a small boat nearby, her 11-year-old son called out anxiously. Men's voices growled advice. The large woman, momentarily dazed by exertion, then remembered she was Mrs. Myrtle Huddleston, proprietor of a Long Beach, Calif., beauty parlor. Four months ago she could not swim a stroke. Now, after lessons from admirers who had seen she was designed to swim by Nature, she had almost swum the Catalina Channel. She began again her laborious strokes . . . reached the oily shore swells . . . was swept toward a ragged reef . . . caught her footing, stood up, collapsed on her face. . . . The men hoisted her into the rowboat. Her time was 20 hr., 42 min. She had eaten nothing.

Greasy and tear-drenched, she lay in blankets on the cruiser Ramona. "O, Mom, you did it, dog-gone you, you did it," sobbed 11-year-old Everett Huddleston.

"I did it for you," muttered Mrs. Huddleston.

Long Beach, Calif., looked forward to new beauty treatments: "The Huddleston Grease Pack," "The Catalina Clip," "The Huddle" (Shampoo).

/- Long, silvery, black-and-bronze-barred "tiger fish" of tropic waters. (TIME, Feb. 7).