Fat Lady of the Lake

Fat Mrs. Myrtle Huddleston is the world's champion endurance swimmer among women. Five years ago. aged 30, she took her first swimming lesson. The next year she swam 36 miles across Catalina Channel in 20 hr., 42 min. She won the ocean championship at Del Ray Beach, Fla., in 1928. when she swam for 31 hr., 18 min. Since then. Mrs. Huddleston has been immersed in various bodies of water more frequently and for longer periods than anyone else of her sex. Most protracted was her sojourn in a Coney Island swimming pool which lasted for 60 hr.. 2 min. Last fortnight, she visited Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, farther north than San Francisco, where the altitude, almost 6,500 feet, makes it hard for a swimmer to inflate her lungs comfortably and where something in the icy, mountain spring water affects the membranes of the nose and causes choking. Mrs. Huddleston examined Lake Tahoe, decided it was big enough; she tried its water, found it sufficiently cold and treacherous for her purposes.

Last week, Mrs. Huddleston returned to Lake Tahoe. Clad in an unbecoming one-piece bathing suit and a coating of grease, she waddled into the water at Glenbrook, Nev., at 7:45 one morning, began to swim an American crawl toward Tahoe Tavern, Calif., 16 miles away. Almost immediately, she began to encounter difficulties. The old man in her pilot boat misdirected her. A wind came up and blew her eight miles off her course. Her goggles began to leak, water to blind her. After the first eight hours, she suffered from acute nausea and pains in her arm. Twice she fainted but, on recovering, prayed that the torture of cold might not be added to her obstacles. She was further encouraged by the yells of her 15-year-old son Everett who accompanied her in a row- boat. Finally, 23 hours after she had entered the water at Glenbrook, Mrs. Huddleston emerged at Tahoe Tavern, walked up the beach unaided, put on her shoes. Though she could have walked farther, she allowed herself to be carried from the beach into the hotel. There she said she regarded her Lake Tahoe swim as greatest of her aquatic achievements.

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