Word: channell
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...waters, announced that she was not really scared, and struck out in the general direction of Dover, England. For fame, for fortune, and for Scripps-Howard and United Artists, grease-coated, 17-year-old Shirley May France of Somerset, Mass. was trying to swim the English Channel...
...both sides of the Channel, newsmen mobilized enough equipment to report a medium-sized war: rocket signals, marine radios, walkie-talkies, telescopes, carrier pigeons, eight boats and three planes. But Shirley May's target date (Aug. 14) came & went. Reporter Bob Musel, ghosting her diary for N.E.A. and covering the story for United Press, blamed repeated postponements on training hitches and bad weather. Delicately, he skirted the main reason, which Editor & Publisher reported as "a delay due to a monthly occurrence peculiar to women...
Head Up, Chin Up. Last week, when Shirley May finally took the plunge, she had missed the good weather. She also missed most of the newsmen. On their way over from England, they were far out in mid-Channel at take-off time aboard a picturesque but snail-slow two-masted schooner, christened the Black Magic by Shirley May's pressagent Ted Worner (and later rechristened the Black Maria by disgusted newsmen). The Associated Press had wisely hired its own steamer, the Red Commodore (complete with a restaurant and bar), as well as a speedboat and plane...
...Sinatra records beamed encouragement to the struggling swimmer: "Down & down I go, round & round I go, like a leaf that's caught in the tide . . . under That Old Black Magic . . ." The Red Commodore also relayed a message from young (18) Briton Philip Mickman, who had unobtrusively swum the Channel two weeks before: "Head up, chin up, spit it out, beat Old Man Channel." Between wireless messages, the A.P. released carrier pigeons to fly bulletins to England. Unfortunately, the pigeons flew to France...
...Hero of a famed hoax concocted by bored newspapermen in 1925, another boom Channel-swimming year. Itchy Guk was solemnly reported by the Paris Herald to have postponed his Channel try because the water, too cold for all the other contenders...