Sport: The Swim Twins

“Ladies, take your marks!” The starter’s gun barked, and six of the U.S.’s fastest women swimmers slammed into the water of Chicago’s Portage Park pool, arms flailing and legs churning. On the fourth lap, the freckle-faced blonde in Lane 4 began to pull away—increasing her lead with each powerful stroke, while her competitors strained vainly to match her pace. At the finish of the 1,500-meter freestyle, Carolyn House was a full 30 meters ahead. Her time: 18 min. 44 sec.—smashing the world record by 18.8 sec. During the next three days at the A.A.U. championships, 17-year-old Carolyn added the 200-meter and 400-meter freestyle titles —the second year in a row she had swept all three races. She set a new American record (2 min. 14.6 sec.) in the 200, a new meet record (4 min. 45.3 sec.) in the 400.

Three Laps Underwater. Daughter of Los Angeles Ear Surgeon Howard Payne House, towheaded Carolyn is almost blind in her left eye (a congenital defect) and wears a contact lens in her right eye. But her eye trouble has never hampered her swimming—or kept her from taking a crack at any other sport that struck her tomboy’s fancy. “At seven,” says her brother Ken, 22, “she could swim three laps of the family pool underwater without coming up for air. At eight, she played center for both of our neighborhood football teams. She’d center for our team, and the opposition would mow her down. When the ball changed hands, she’d switch over to the other side and we’d run over her. She never once complained.”

By the time she was eleven, Carolyn was such a good athlete that she thought she was ready for the Los Angeles Athletic Club’s swimming team. Coach Peter Daland told her to go home and wait until she was twelve. Next year she made the team. Daland worked long hours to strengthen her arm and shoulder muscles, get more power into her kick. In 1960, when she was just 14, Carolyn broke the American 1,500-meter record, placed second to Defending Champion Chris von Saltza in the 400-meter freestyle, and earned a trip to the Rome Olympics.

Sharing the Glory. In peak form for last week’s A.A.U. championships, Carolyn had to share her glory with another Los Angeles teenager: her best friend, 16-year-old Sharon Finneran, who broke the listed world records in the 200-meter butterfly (2 min. 31.2 sec.) and the 400-meter individual medley (5 min. 25.4 sec.). A swimming nomad, Sharon was born in Rockville Centre, N.Y., started swimming competitively in Florida, moved with her schoolteacher mother to Los Angeles last year to work with Carolyn and Coach Daland. The girls live only six blocks apart, and both attend John Marshall High School, where Carolyn is a senior, Sharon a junior. Up at 6 each morning, the two head for Los Angeles’ Olympic Swim Stadium for a three-hour workout: sprints, turns, 60 laps of the 50-meter pool. At 5 each afternoon, they are back in the pool for another 1½ hr. session with Daland.

Already training hard for the 1964 Olympics, the girls have little time for the usual teen-ager’s fun: no dates, just an occasional busman’s holiday at Balboa Beach. “But we can’t stay too long in the sun,” says Sharon. “When you’re burned, it hurts to swim.” The hours between practice sessions are spent building up muscles by exercising with pulley weights and adding weight to their youthful frames by stoking up on steaks and milkshakes. Says Carolyn: “Once you get on top, you have to work to stay there. It’s funny. All these years, we little swimmers pointed toward beating Von Saltza and the others. All of a sudden, it’s all changed. Everybody wants to beat me.”