led to accusations in the British press that the two tugs had in fact sheltered Ederle from the bad weather and thus made her swim "easier". During her twelfth hour at sea, Burgess, her trainer, had become so concerned by unfavorable winds that he called to her 'Gertie, you must come out!' The swimmer lifted her head from the choppy waters and replied, 'What for?' Only five men had been able to swim the English Channel before Ederle. The best time had been 16 hours, 33 minutes by Enrique Tiraboschi. Ederle walked up the beach at Kingsdown, England, after 14 hours and 34 minutes. The first person to greet her was a British immigration officer who requested a passport from "the bleary-eyed, waterlogged teenager". When Ederle returned home, she was greeted with a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan. More than two million people lined the streets of the parade route to cheer her. She made an arrangement with Edward L. Hyman to make a personal appearance at the Brooklyn Mark Strand, and she was paid an amount far greater than they had ever paid an individual performer prior. Subsequently, she went on to play herself in a movie (Swim Girl, Swim starring Bebe Daniels) and tour the vaudeville circuit, including later Billy Rose's Aquacade. She met President Coolidge and had a song and a dance step named for her. Her manager, Dudley Field Malone, was not able to capitalize on her notoriety, so Ederle's career in vaudeville wasn't a huge financial success. The Great Depression also diminished her financial rewards. A fall down the steps of her apartment building in 1933 twisted her spine and left her bedridden for several years, but she recovered well enough to appear at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Death Ederle had poor hearing since childhood due to measles, and by the 1940s she was almost completely deaf. Aside from her time in vaudeville, she taught swimming to deaf children. She was never married and she was living in an old peoples home in 2001. She died on November 30, 2003, in Wyckoff, New Jersey, at the age of 97. She was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City. Legacy Ederle was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame as an "Honor Swimmer" in 1965. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2003. An annual swim