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Marilyn Di Lascio at the Woodland Pond pool. PHOTO: RICHARD BEAVEN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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4 R% x; f# Z" n/ |9 y$ {By [size=1.4]KEVIN HELLIKER
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" @$ V2 z% X' t% c5 TUpdated Feb. 15, 2016 5:55 p.m. ET15 COMMENTS$ P9 h1 r A$ O1 Q
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New Paltz, N.Y.
In 1954, the renowned American distance swimmer Florence Chadwick received a tantalizing offer: Swim across Lake Ontario—something no human had ever done—and she would receive $10,000, the equivalent of nearly $90,000 today.
The offer, from an annual event called the Canadian National Exhibition, irritated some Canadians who thought that surely one of their own compatriots could accomplish that feat. Years earlier, after all, when chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. offered $25,000 to the first person to swim from Catalina Island to mainland California, the winner of that prize had been a Canadian, George Young.
Young had since retired, however, and the swimmer recruited to compete against Chadwick was a 16-year-old Toronto girl named Marilyn Bell. Chadwick was an international star from California who had set records swimming the English Channel in both directions. Bell, by contrast, was unknown outside her Toronto swim club.
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Marilyn Bell crawls ashore after swimming the English Channel in 1955. PHOTO: NORMAN JAMES/TORONTO STAR/GETTY IMAGES* ]5 l) u: |# W& F2 k0 |+ \
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On race night, the two swimmers dove into Lake Ontario from its New York shores. Chadwick lasted only a few hours. One moment short of 21 hours, Bell reached the Canadian shore in Toronto, earning her headlines around the world. A year later, at 17, she became the youngest person ever to swim the English Channel.
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In an era of distance-swimming celebrities, Bell reigned as one of North America’s most visible athletes. In 1954, she won Canada’s prestigious Lou Marsh trophy, awarded to the country’s top athlete. Photographs from that time show her standing beside Ed Sullivan and Roy Rogers.
Then Marilyn Bell did something extraordinary: She disappeared.
Almost 60 years later, she moved into a retirement center called Woodland Pond at New Paltz. She went now by Marilyn Di Lascio, the surname she’d taken at age 19 upon marrying a New Jersey government worker named Joe Di Lascio. For decades she raised four children as a New Jersey housewife, then went back to school, obtained a graduate education degree and taught special-needs children. Neither at school nor at home was there any talk of her illustrious past.
“I was the youngest of her kids, and I was 11 or 12 when my siblings and I collectively had an ah-ha moment about who our mother was,” says Jodi Di Lascio, Di Lascio’s daughter.
Nobody at Woodland Pond knew about her past either. “After all that attention, I just wanted to live a normal life,” says Di Lascio.
She still liked the water. After the death of her husband of 50 years, she chose to move to Woodland Pond in part because it had an indoor pool. Not that she actually swam. A worsening case of scoliosis had crippled her in her 70s. To get around she used a motorized chair. In the pool, she merely floated on her back, gently kicking her feet. “It hurt too much to try to swim,” she says.
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# @0 d$ o* ^% W2 S0 ^* lMarilyn Di Lascio, left, and Paul Lurie at the Woodland Pond pool swimming with instructor Terry Laughlin.PHOTO: RICHARD BEAVEN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL( s7 A% M! H4 }7 }: d+ ~
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The star of the Woodland Pond pool was Paul Lurie, a retired pioneer of pediatric cardiology. He didn’t swim faster or farther than anybody else. In a place where no measure of athleticism is more prized than defiance of age, Lurie was the big man on campus. He didn’t start swimming laps until he was 94. Before that, he’d run stairs at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where he was chief of pediatric cardiology.
A case of atrial fibrillation in his early 90s prompted Lurie to ditch the stairs in favor of a lower-intensity workout, and it was in part because of its pool that he chose to move to Woodland Pond. Eager to teach himself proper freestyle technique and learn a second stroke, Lurie went online to investigate an international swim-improvement program called “Total Immersion,” and made an amazing discovery: The founder of Total Immersion, Terry Laughlin, lived in New Paltz.
Lurie got in his car, drove to Laughlin’s house and knocked on the door. When Laughlin’s grown daughter answered, she found on their doorstep a 94-year-old man saying he wanted to learn to swim butterfly.
Typically, a two-day Total Immersion seminar costs $495. But Laughlin went to Woodland Pond and provided free-of-charge lessons to Lurie, seeing in him the chance to explore a question: How old is too old to improve as a swimmer?
After a handful of lessons, Laughlin streamlined Lurie’s freestyle so dramatically that a video of them swimming side-by-side offers little evidence which man is the coach and which the student. Within a year, Lurie cut in half the time it took him to swim 20 lengths, a workout he performs every weekday morning. For a second stroke, Laughlin taught the old man backstroke, having decided that butterfly was too ambitious.
Neither man paid much attention to the woman who arrived during their workouts on a motorized chair, and who floated on her back, gently kicking her feet.
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Paul Lurie, left, Marilyn DiLascio, center, at the Woodland Pond pool with instructor Terry Laughlin. PHOTO:RICHARD BEAVEN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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A local reporter, while writing about Di Lascio’s involvement with a Woodland Pond philanthropic effort, searched her online and learned about her past. When Woodland Pond administrators found out, they arranged to show in the community theater a 2001 made-for-television movie called, “Heart: The Marilyn Bell Story.” After the showing, Di Lascio stood to answer questions about her feats as Marilyn Bell. She also explained that scoliosis now made it too painful for her to swim. In the audience was Lurie, who came forward afterward to suggest that she consider taking lessons from Laughlin.
“I thought maybe Terry could teach her to swim without pain,” says Lurie. “It seemed such a shame that this superstar could only float on her back.”
“I wasn’t particularly interested in doing it,” recalls Di Lascio. “But Paul so wanted me to try, and Terry was very eager too.”
At the pool, Laughlin asked her to swim a couple laps. “It was very painful,” she says.
What Laughlin saw convinced him that he could help her. “Marilyn displayed class 1950s form,” says Laughlin. “Head high. Hips flat. Legs churning. Not salutary for the spine.”
Under Laughlin’s guidance, Di Lascio deconstructed her championship stroke and learned to keep her head aligned with her spine, rotate her torso and calm her kick, allowing her legs to draft behind the upper body. In short order, she was swimming two hours a day without pain.
At 98, Lurie recently published his first book, “A Cardiologist Explains Things: Basic Information for the Layperson.”
“He’s a hard person to keep up with,” says Di Lascio. But in her own way, she’s trying. At 78, she has devised a new goal for when she turns 80: She wants to participate in an annual 13-mile Hudson River swim. “I don’t know whether I will be able to do it, but it’s an exciting thing to think about,” she says.
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