1st American Women Channel Team

L-R Susan Allen, Susan Cobb, Lisa Smith, Carol McGrath,
Joni Beemsterboer, Karen Drucker

The first women to break the gender barrier at the Dolphin Club became the first American women to form a successful English Channel relay team.  Although Gertrude Ederle paved the way with a solo channel swim in 1926, it took over half a century for six American women to follow in her wake.  Together, they conquered the world's most prestigious marathon swim pinnacle in August, 1989 in ten hours and forty-eight minutes.

For Joni Beemsterboer, a sign posted in the San Francisco Jewish Community Center in 1977 provided the catalyst that led to becoming a member of this team.  The sign encouraged people interested in swimming the Golden Gate to meet at the Buena Vista Cafe for a briefing and test swim.  After sign-in and briefing, the aspirants trudged to the shore of Aquatic Park Lagoon. In the water, Dino Landucci, a venerable Dolphin, piloted the swimmers around the course.  Joni knew she had passed the test when the organizer stopped her in mid-swim and said, "So--for the after party--do you want to bring ground beef or wine?"

Dino suggested to the group that they keep swimming in the Bay to prepare for the longer Golden Gate swim.  Heeding his advice, Joni and her cohorts swam regularly off the beach of Aquatic Park, warming up in their cars afterwards.  In the process, she acquired the then-requisite two sponsors to apply for membership at the Dolphin Club in October, 1977.

Women had been allowed to petition for membership only one year earlier and the welcome was not universally cordial.  Some of the leadership had admonished the club's volunteer legal representative that, "Money is no object.  Just make this go away."  However, the club was located on city property and gender exclusion was no longer an option.  Then, as now, the club required applicants to appear in person before the board.  Joni remembers several male members taking great delight in the women's discomfiture as they stood and stated their reasons for joining.

Early women members of the Dolphin Club

Back then, the women's shower was a tiny tin contraption in a cramped and drafty locker room.  After the hot water handle broke, they used a pair of vice-grip pliers to make crude attempts to adjust the temperature.  Sometimes this was futile given that the hot water for the women's shower was on a separate boiler and regularly out of order.  They also endured the decidedly crude remarks of hardcore male members as they entered and exited the water.  In spite of the hardships the women began to permeate the fabric of the club.  Perhaps because of the hardships they began to form close bonds with each other.  And to the delight of the columnist, Herb Caen, they even began finishing ahead of the men in swim races.

It was this bubbling caldron of fast, intrepid, cold-water swimmers that produced the first American women's channel relay team.  Lisa Smith approached five Dolphins, including Joni to join the effort.  They conducted the usual training preparations, complete with night swims.  As Joni recalls with evident nostalgic fondness, "On the day [of our relay swim], we were a finely honed instrument."  Looking back, it seems natural that of all the swim clubs in the United States, the Dolphin Club would produce this ground-breaking collection of women:  All American, all Dolphins, all women.