It was just over two years ago that Diana Nyad had much of the world following along on her fifth — and, finally, successful — attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. She was 64 and the first person to complete the 111-mile, 53-hour journey without the aid of a shark cage when she came ashore on a Key West beach on Labor Day weekend. The news particularly resonated in Atlanta, where Nyad had enrolled as a freshman at Emory University in 1967, only to be kicked out of school later for parachuting out a fourth-story dormitory window.
Now Nyad's written a book, "Find a Way," that will be released on Oct. 20th. The highly personal book, which Nyad will discuss and sign at the Carter Center on Nov. 3rd, covers the Cuba swim in depth, as well as a life chockfilled with other major achievements, colorful episodes and obstacles overcome.
“Above all, I’m just a person who cherishes a bold journey,” Nyad writes. “A person who refuses to let this one wild and precious life slip quietly by.”
Here’s hoping she’ll have more to say about Emory and Atlanta than the single paragraph they get in “Find a Way” (“A fine school, a fine city, but a low time in my life,” she writes before going on to describe the parachute incident as “a desperate, immature attempt for attention”).
Fortunately, the AJC explored Nyad’s time here in a story published soon after her successful Cuba-to-Florida swim.
Here’s some of what the story revealed about college life back then, including the fact that there were still curfews for female students:
“More than one Emory freshman undoubtedly had adjustment issues in the fall of 1967, when the campus was starting to deal with —- too fast for some, not quickly enough for others —- issues of race, women’s rights and the war in Vietnam. Nyad, meanwhile, was a state champion and potential Olympian from the swimming hotbed of Florida who found herself rushing a sorority, rather than competing in the water against other colleges (Emory didn’t form a women’s intercollegiate swim team until the 1972-73 school year).”
We also talked the editor of the student newspaper at the time, who discussed Nyad’s persona then and now — and that parachute jump.
“All I know is that it’s sort of this legend, which I read about at some point, ” said Rodney Derrick of Durham, who was editor of the Emory Wheel that year. The student newspaper printed nothing about the jump.
It all just adds to the mystique surrounding Nyad’s brief tenure at Emory, a mystique that continues to grow as her peers age, memories fade and the swimmer herself says little (she wasn’t available for an interview, a Swim for Relief spokesperson said).
But there’s also a sense of quiet pride over Nyad’s barrier breaking accomplishments and the notion that, if nothing else, Emory helped push her out into the world at a time when she was already starting to think big.
“I’m exceedingly proud and pleased for her, ” said Derrick, 66, who posted a photo of Nyad that had run in the Wheel’s sports section in 1968 on his Facebook page “as soon as she touched the shore” last month. “We happened to be on the same campus at the same time, and when I was editor, her picture graced our pages.”
To read the entire story — including why someone who knew her in Florida and at Emory recalled, "Diana was full of mischief" — go here.
To attend the Carter Center event at 7 p.m. on Nov. 3rd, you must have a ticket. They're available for $29 for individuals or $39 for couples at A Cappella Books in Inman Park or online at www.acappellabooks.com (tickets include a signed copy of "Find a Way.") Depending on availability, tickets also will be sold at the door at the Carter Center on the night of the event.
