When you recently swam 110 miles through shark-infested waters at an age when others are navigating Social Security, it takes a lot for another incident in your life to stand out.
Enter the matter of Diana Nyad's exit from Emory University some 45 years ago.
Apparently she left via a fourth floor dorm window. Clutching a parachute.
"I will simply say that this was my belated, confused adolescent year," Nyad, 64, wrote in "Other Shores," her 1978 book about her endurance swimming exploits that's being hawked for as much as $1,000 online these days. At some point in her sophomore year after she and her chute had made the leap, Nyad, who sets off on another high-profile swim today, added: "I was kicked out of Emory."
Details of the leap are sketchy, though it quickly became Emory lore and followed Nyad’s storied, if eccentric career. And the reasons for her expulsion are murky, although there seems to be consensus that the window incident had something to do with it.
But 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).
"Women were protected then, and not always in the most graceful way," recalled Lorrie Hallman, an Atlanta clinical psychologist who was president of Emory's Delta Delta Delta sorority in the 1967-68 school year, when Nyad pledged. "There were still curfews for the women."
More to the point, Nyad's hardly known for undramatic gestures, whether it's the Cuba-to-Key West swim she finally completed on her fifth try over Labor Day weekend, or — still riding high on a renewed wave of attention — her "Swim for Relief" that starts today in New York City's Herald Square. Nyad will raise money for Hurricane Sandy relief by swimming laps for 48 consecutive hours in a temporary pool erected practically on the spot where the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade comes to a splashy conclusion each year.
While it seems everyone has heard about that long-ago parachute plunge, pinning down specific details about it is tough. But not as tough as finding someone these days who was actually there.
"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.”
That photo is one of the few tangible bits of evidence of Nyad's coed career in Atlanta. Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL) owns a copy of her 174-page book — in which she dispatches with her time at Emory in a little over a paragraph that's short on names, dates and details. Later, she gained more insight into herself and opened up more personally, telling Out Magazine, for instance, that she was 21 when she realized she was gay.
Student records are covered by federal privacy laws, but telephone books in the Emory archives show she lived in Harris Hall during the 1967-68 and 1968-69 school years.
Harris Hall was part of a group of women's dorms near the main quadrangle and "far away from fraternity row on the other side of the campus," Hallman laughingly recalled. There were no sorority houses at Emory then, so they all shared a Panhellenic House.
Freshmen needed a reference from a former Delta Delta Delta member to go through rush, which featured three rounds of parties. A single no vote from a member after the final round was all it took to prevent someone from becoming a pledge.
“There wasn’t social media then, or Twitter to give you instant connections,” Barbara “Buff” Herbert Quillian of Atlanta, who pledged Tri Delta the same year as Nyad, said about the role of sororities then. “I thought, these were all nice, friendly people and it was a way to be active in college.”
Indeed, Nyad helped her sorority finish second in the Girls Intra-Mural Swimming Meet her freshman year, winning all three events she entered in record-setting time. That was likely her only competitive swimming outlet on campus — or on any campus in those years before Title IX — said Abbott "Bo" Kagan, who swam for the Emory men's team at the time.
“Not many (colleges) had women’s swim teams back then,” said Kagan, now an orthopedic surgeon in Florida, where his younger brother and Nyad attended the same high school. “In fact, I’m not sure if there were any.”
When Nyad visited Emory as a high school senior, Kagan picked her and her mother up at the airport; when she enrolled, his brother asked him to look after her. Mostly, Kagan suggests, he watched with amusement.
“Diana was full of mischief,” Kagan chuckled. “She had quite a personality, and she was always playing tricks on people.”
Current Emory swimming coach Jon Howell has contacted some men's team members from that period to ask if Nyad ever trained with them. The answers he's gotten so far: No. "But one of the guys said it would have made practice a lot more fun." After one formal party, Howell said he's heard, "She brought the whole dance down to the pool and (people) did flips off the high dive in formal dress."
Kagan says Nyad tried to paint the stone lion in front of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and — as tradition dictated — had her head shaved after getting caught. He thinks he'd already left for medical school when a friend told him Nyad planned to parachute out of a window.
“I thought, ‘That’s Diana.’”
But what of the Diana who wrote in "Other Shores" that her first year at Emory was "the worst year of my life?" Was she perhaps looking back too longingly to her days in the pool? Or looking ahead too impatiently for something bigger to come along?
“When you come to a school with an identity and then you don’t have that anymore, I think you’re searching,” Kagan said.
If she found it in open water and marathon swims like tomorrow’s in New York, Howell said, good for her. If he can ever find someone to confirm that, yes, she trained with the Emory team or its coach, even better.
"It would close out this story," Howell said. "Just from a historical perspective, it would be nice to say she actually swam at Emory."
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