REPRINTED FROM 4-15-2010
BRONX TIMES REPORTER, FEBRUARY 1 BTR 5-21, 2019 49
BRONX SCENE
Myrtle Huddleston, swimmer, established records
Myrtle Huddleston poses with her son, Everett, after one of her longdistance
swimming feats.
It’s always interesting to
see how some people earn a living.
Mrs. Myrtle Huddleston
was operating a beauty parlor
in San Diego in 1926 when she
realized that she really had
to lose some weight. She took
swimming lessons thinking
that doing laps would help her
shed a few pounds and only
four months later she became
the fi rst woman to ever swim
the Santa Catalina channel.
The distance from Santa Catalina
Island to the mainland
was 25 miles. The feat was accomplished
on February 6, 1927
in 20 hours and forty-two minutes.
This accomplishment
led to a career in swimming
and soon she was traveling the
world seeking to set new records.
A New York Times article of
August 11, 1928 has her living
in the Bronx but she seems to
have resided wherever she was
swimming. She was living in
Mattoon, Illinois in May of that
year when she set a new record
at the Lincoln Park West Hotel
in Chicago. She swam for 50
hours and ten minutes besting
the female record by almost 18
hours and beating the men’s
record set by Otto Kammerich
by four hours and ten minutes.
She received a total of $5,000 for
the feat. Bannerman Hotels
gave her a thousand dollars
for breaking the female record
and a thousand dollars for each
hour that she beat the men’s record.
She broke the world’s endurance
record that summer
of 1928. She swam at the Metropolitan
Pool here in the
Bronx on July 23rd breaking
the record by swimming for 54
hours and twenty-eight minutes.
The pool was located on
Westchester Avenue where it
had a frontage of 172 feet and
extended back along Whitlock
Avenue for 769 feet. The huge
pool and ancillary buildings
with locker rooms, refreshment
stands and such went on
the auction block in April of
1930 but the pool found its way
into the record books thanks to
Mrs. Huddleston’s feat of 1928.
Even when another woman,
Mrs. Lee Fourrier, broke her
endurance record on August 16,
1928, rather than rant and rave,
she was a good sport and said
“it shows what we women can
do.” She did, by the way, regain
the endurance title by swimming
for an incredible 60 hours
and two minutes on September
15, 1928 in the pool at Ravenhall
Baths on Coney Island.
When asked what she considered
her greatest achievement,
she would undoubtedly
answer that it was swimming
Lake Tahoe. Located on the
border of Nevada and California,
it has an altitude of 6,500
feet which makes breathing
especially diffi cult for swimmers.
Combine that with the
coldness of the water and you
have a near impossible situation.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Huddleston
took the challenge and
swam it in 23 hours. She was
awarded $700 for the feat.
She passed away on January
29, 1937 at only 39 years of
age from chronic heart problems
and for all her celebrity
appearances, it was sad that
she died in the charity ward
of the county hospital in San
Francisco. Among her other
illnesses, she was nearly blind.
She left one son, Everett, who
was by his mother’s side in a
rowboat throughout most of
her swimming feats. Think
of Myrtle Huddleston the next
time you pass the area of the
Metropolitan Pool at the Whitlock
Avenue station of the IRT
#6 line.