Florence May Chadwick was born in
San Diego on November 9, 1918. Her parents were Richard Chadwick, a police officer, and Mary Lacko, a homemaker who later operated a San Diego restaurant. Chadwick grew up in the
Point Loma neighborhood of San Diego and graduated from
Point Loma Junior-Senior High School in 1936. She attended
San Diego State College and studied at several law schools and a business college. She was married and divorced twice, and had no children.
Early swimming and instruction Chadwick entered swimming competitions from a young age, scoring her first win at the age of ten, but she realized she preferred ocean events rather than pool swims. Chadwick first began instruction and competition with 1924 Olympian Florence Chambers, and the
Florence Chambers Swim Club in San Diego at the age of 9, around 1927, and continued to swim with the Chambers Club through around 1932, when she switched to the Los Angeles Athletic Club. At the age of 10, she became the youngest person to swim across the mouth of
San Diego Bay. Starting at age eleven, she competed in rough water swims, winning an annual 2.5-mile race in the ocean off
La Jolla, North of San Diego, 10 times in 18 years. On July 4, 1933, Chadwick handily won the 600-yard Venice Roughwater Swim for Women with a time of 15 minutes flat. Chadwick swam in Southern California ocean races as an amateur for several decades, but had her heart set to
swim across the English Channel. Not all of her long-distance swim attempts were successful. In 1954, she tried to become the first person to swim across
Lake Ontario but gave up after becoming ill a few hours into her swim. Other unsuccessful attempts included the
Strait of Juan de Fuca and two tries at the
Irish Sea (her last major swim attempt in 1960).
Other employment She gave product endorsements and served for many years as the spokesperson for
Catalina Swimwear. She taught swimming at a number of venues and worked with
Esther Williams to design movie swimming sequences. She also worked as a credit counselor and stockbroker, and was an executive at San Diego's First Wall Street Corporation. She died at San Diego's Mercy Hospital of leukemia on March 15, 1995. After cremation, her ashes were scattered into the ocean off San Diego's Point Loma, not too distant from where she grew up, went to High School, and completed many of her earliest open water swims in La Jolla and San Diego Harbor. == Recognition and honors ==