100-Year-Old Aquatic Champ Still Making a Splash

She’s supremely confident, strikingly beautiful--and the oldest American competitive diver who still takes the plunge, more than 80 years after she first took to the water.

Viola Cady Krahn’s fearless half-twist dives still sparkle as much as the medals and trophies she won eight decades ago, as a 21-year-old swimming and diving champ, a star in an emerging California beach culture.

Now 100 years old, she can still tell of standing on the shoulders of the undisputed king of surfers, Duke Kahanamoku, as he rode the waves of Laguna Beach, not far from Krahn’s present home in Leisure World.

She was the leader of a team of swimmers that first made it from Long Beach to Catalina. But, in spite of her many swimming and diving titles, she never made it to the 1924 Olympics with prospective teammates such as Johnny Weismuller and Kahanamoku: Her new husband was afraid she’d fall in love with one of them and didn’t want her to go.

In 1919, with the Roaring ‘20s just around the corner, 18-year-old Viola Hartmann was ready to bust loose. While vacationing in Long Beach from her home in Arizona, she honed her swimming skills and finally swam out to the battleship Vermont, anchored more than a mile offshore. Plucked like a fish from the sea by the surprised crew, she was bundled up by sailors who rowed her ashore and asked for her phone number.

Two years later, still feeling the tug of the Pacific, she left the heat of landlocked Arizona behind and headed back to Los Angeles to pursue a swimming career. She joined the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where her prowess caught the eye of Fred Cady, who coached swimming and diving to a gold mine’s worth of Olympic and potential Olympic athletes, including Kahanamoku, Weismuller, Buster Crabbe, Georgia Coleman and Mickey Riley.

With Cady’s help, Krahn won junior national diving championships in 1922, ’23 and ’24. In 1922, at an exhibition swim meet between the L.A. and Venice athletic clubs, she won the 220-meter race in 2 minutes and 6 seconds. “This was the fastest time a female had covered the distance in the club pool,” wrote Krahn’s niece, Margery Voyer Cole, in her book “Viola, Diving Wonder and Aquatic Champion.”

The intricacies of diving, the strength and balance it required, paled in comparison with her next challenge: riding endless waves while standing on the shoulders of Kahanamoku in 1922, at an event widely covered by the press.

It may have been one of her most valuable maneuvers, because it prompted Cady, the coach, to begin courting the young swimmer. Cady, a sculptor, artist and former strong man for Barnum & Bailey Circus, nearly 20 years her senior, muscled his way to a victory by marrying her in 1923.

Marriage did not deter her winning more swimming and diving medals, and she was a strong favorite for the 1924 U.S. swim team in the Paris Olympics. But her new husband never entered her name. “He feared I’d fall in love with someone else,” she said.

She stopped competing and hunkered down to being a housewife.

“Even though I never had children, I still believed the woman took care of the household. But if I had to do it again, I’d go to every swim meet with Cady, put my two cents in and probably get into trouble,” she said.

But her retirement was short-lived. In 1926, the year after Cady was named USC’s head swimming and diving coach, she was back in the limelight.

Looking for a way to lure tourists to Catalina, chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., who owned the island, offered $25,000 to amateur swimmers who could swim the 21-mile channel. To test whether this was possible, the Los Angeles Athletic Club and the Pacific Coast Club of Long Beach asked Cady to organize a relay team of more than a dozen long-distance champion professional swimmers, including his wife, who would lead the team.

On Sept. 9, 1926, cameras clicked as Krahn waded into the 67-degree Long Beach surf and began swimming the first mile and a half leg of the grueling swim that would eventually become the granddaddy of ocean events in Southern California.

“It wasn’t easy,” Krahn said.

Along the way, she gutted it out more than a mile at a time, battling deep currents and choppy waves. She swallowed ocean water, which left her vomiting. “But my leg cramps were the worst,” she said.

Her husband monitored the team in a rowboat, while a yacht kept the group on a fairly straight course and offered support and rest for the exhausted swimmers.

And 23 hours and 27 minutes later, Krahn and her teammates emerged near Avalon, proving the swim could be done. Cady, acknowledging the difficulties, told the press: “It will take swimmers, husky and muscular, who trained in icy-cold waters for months” to make it across the channel.

A few months later, before Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic, a 17-year-old Canadian, George Young, made the exhausting solo swim and won the $25,000 prize.

Cady and his wife watched as 102 swimmers started the competition for the big prize, to which another $15,000 had been added in case a woman finished the swim. One contestant, heavily greased in beef suet, donned three pairs of long, woolen undersuits tied at the ankles with ropes. “When the gun sounded for the beginning of the race, he sank like a stone,” the press reported.

(Since 1927, when the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation began monitoring such attempts, about 100 people have completed the swim.)

Over the years, Krahn continued to “keep the home fires burning” while Cady traveled and coached at five Olympics and taught a long list of celebrity clients how to swim and dive, among them actors Harold Lloyd and Errol Flynn, and tobacco heiress Doris Duke.

In 1941, Duke, “the richest girl in the world,” arrived at the Santa Barbara Biltmore Hotel to train under Cady. Weeks later she returned to Shangri-La, her Moroccan-themed winter retreat in Hawaii, with Cady and Flynn in tow. Duke had a hydraulic lift installed above her pool as a diving platform, so she could show off her diving skill to her guests.

Cady coached until 1958 at USC and died two years later. He was posthumously inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame; his wife has not been so honored.

In the late 1960s, Krahn moved from her Sherman Oaks home to Leisure World to be near the ocean again. There, she met and married her second husband, Fred Krahn. They were married in 1970 and he died in 1986. Through his support, she returned to diving in 1978.

Krahn has kept her 5-foot, 6-inch body in peak shape to compete in the U.S. Masters Division; she’s the only competitor in the 100-or-older ranks in the 1-meter and 3-meter springboard events one step below Olympic level.

“I think it’s fun to try to win. I just have to remember to keep my buns up,” she said with a smile.

Many of Krahn’s trophies and mementos, which span 80 years, are displayed in her home, from huge trophies to a medal small enough to fit into the palm of her hand. Among her collection is a medal won by Kahanamoku, and the 1928 Olympic silver medal won by Georgia Coleman, who bequeathed it to her friend. Krahn would have more, but she often gives away her medals to the champion swimmers at the Special Olympics for handicapped children.

Although Krahn gave up her driver’s license this year, she can still be a caution on the golf course, with a recent 14 handicap. She throws in a little tennis and horseback riding now and then, and attributes her longevity to good genes--and perhaps, she says, good Scotch. With water, of course.