Swimmer Marilyn Bell recalls historic Lake Ontario crossing

Seventeen-year-old Marilyn Bell with coach Gus Ryder. Bell is wearing “The Marilyn Bell Swimsuit” designed by Catalina and offered for purchase all over Canada.

Bell Di Lascio still credits a lot of her success to circumstance. “When I think back, it was just I think being in the right place at the right time and having a coach who was patient — and who knew how I ticked.”

Unusual for an open water marathon swim today, the whole event was done with subterfuge.

“It was cloaked in secrecy, first of all, because the Canadian National Exhibition — which was the sponsoring organization — had made this bona fide contract with Florence Chadwick,” she said. “She came into this controversial situation. There were two newspapers, the Toronto Star and The Toronto Telegram. They were always at war with each one another.”

Bell’s coach pitched the papers her story to gain sponsorship and publicity on the race — without her knowledge. But they also needed transportation, which the media — hungry for pictures of the action — promised to provide.

“It turned out the Toronto Star took the bait,” she said. “My coach pitched it to them. He knew that he needed backing for his swimmer — one way or another. The Telegram turned it down, and the Star said yes. So they provided a boat and a horde of newspapers, reporters and photographers.”

Canadian journalism students still study the race — mostly because of how it reflects on the media. The 1950s were such a cut-throat, blatantly competitive period in Toronto that reporters sabotaged their competition’s cars during the swim.

Recovering in the ambulance after the swim, Bell later learned the woman she thought was a nurse was a Telegram reporter. Her private conversation with her friend, during the ambulance ride, ended up on the front page verbatim.

At Youngstown, at the mouth of the Niagara River, Bell prepared to get into the water. The weather looked iffy on Sept. 6 — the original night of the swim.

“We had high winds and cold water, and I guess a cold front moving through on the lake. And Lake Ontario is no place you want to be in bad weather,” she said. “Florence had put in her contract that she would decide when to go.”

They delayed two days. On Sept. 8, the weather was still bad, but it was breaking. Chadwick entered the water at the Coast Guard station at about 11 p.m., but the news the race had started wasn’t immediately transferred to Bell or Roach.

“We had maybe an hour to prepare. Unfortunately, my dad and my coach went for a walk,” she explained. “We were all living on this little boat. It was very tense — really close quarters. It was a beautiful yacht, but it wasn’t designed to have hordes of people.”

After a mad dash to get her dad and coach to the yacht, they took a risk to get the 16-year-old swimmer on the lake sooner. They hitched a ride with a stranger, took her by car to the Coast Guard station, telling her to dive in the river, swim out into the lake — until the escort boat could meet her.

“It was 11 o’clock at night. No moon. I mean, it was a stormy night. And there were all kind of floodlights at the Coast Guard station. So Florence came down. She dove in. She took off,” Bell Di Lascio said. “So I was standing there looking out at the dark. I’d never swum at night before. I was petrified of night swimming.”

Her coach convinced her that the dark wouldn’t matter once she got swimming.

“The last thing he said to me before they transported me to the start was, ‘When you dive in, just swim out of the river … Just swim straight out and we’ll find you. I’ll find you.’ Which, in retrospect, was like this crazy, crazy thing. Why, number one, was he so sure that he would find me? And why did I believe him?

“It was the coach and the swimmer. I had so much faith and trust in him.”

With Chadwick, the favorite, gone, those big floodlights turned off. Surrounded by black on all sides, she remembers crying as she swam — unsure if she’d find her coach or her escort crew.

“I couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky started,” she said. “It seemed endless.”

After a while, she saw dim lights in the distance. She kept going. “Finally, I heard Gus’s voice. He was calling me. ‘Marilyn. Marilyn.’ He had a big powered flashlight. So I swam to the light and we were on our way.”

Winnie Roach had to give up because she never found her escort boat. “She swam for several hours and finally a fishing boat picked her up and brought her back to shore.”

Marathon swimming doesn’t necessarily lend itself to knowing what the competition is up to. Bell remembers not really being aware of Roach’s fate or really what Chadwick was doing.

“My goal as I started was I just wanted to swim farther than Florence Chadwick did, because I didn’t believe she could do it. I never told anybody that. Years later I told my coach after I stopped swimming,” she said. “I wanted to prove that a Canadian could swim farther than the American. For me, that’s what it was about.”

She swam through the night. The lights shining on her swim attracted disgusting lamprey eels — a leech-like bloodsucking invasive species that plagues the Great Lakes.

“At night, you have no warning. They’re just wrapping around your leg. But I hit them,” she said. “We were trained to try to hit them in the head with your fist — and then they lose that suction.”

Toronto, off in the distance, never seemed to get any closer. She swam through the whole next day, her coach Gus Ryder passing food to her from the boat. She even fell asleep a few times, getting jostled back to consciousness by her coach yelling at her or the crew banging on the boat.