Eva Morrison
Canadian born American distance swimmer
Eva Belle Morrison Abdou (March 8, 1911 – March 17, 1985) was a Boston hospital librarian, and a long-distance swimmer who made three attempts to cross the English Channel (in 1926, 1935, and 1937), but never succeeded. She was the first woman from New England to attempt to swim the channel. She was on the Board of Governors of the International Professional Swimmers' Association.
Early life
She was born on March 8, 1911, in Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada, one of six children, having three brothers and two sisters.
She completed her first 5-mile swim in 1918. In 1926 she lost the Boston Light swim after swimming for over 7 hours in frigid water. She was the last competitor to drop out of the race.
Violin scandal (1927)
In 1924, Boston violin maker and dealer Peter Baltzerson introduced Morrison to John Coggeshall, a wealthy Providence, Rhode Island wool merchant and antique violin collector. Baltzerson later told Morrison that Coggeshall had made her a gift of the violin — though Coggeshall had apparently arranged with Baltzerson to pay for it himself, an arrangement of which Morrison was unaware.
About a year later, after running into Coggeshall and his wife at Baltzerson's shop and learning he was married, Morrison immediately ended their friendship.
“Eva Morrison” enters the record as canadian born American distance swimmer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Morrison, Canadian and born can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eva Morrison” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.