A Century of Running the Reds

LATE AT NIGHT ON JUNE 30, 1920, JOSEPH DUNBAR and two friends left their cabins at George Williams College Camp in Williams Bay on popular Geneva Lake and set off in a canoe for a night paddle. What should have been a carefree diversion went tragically wrong. The three friends found themselves in the lake, their boat capsized. Just the previous day, the twenty-year-old Dunbar had won a swimming competition at the camp, so he attempted to swim to shore while his friends clung to the hull of the canoe calling for help. A neighbor, John A. Slocum, heard their screams and jumped in his rowboat (wearing only his pajamas) to assist the stranded boaters, but it was too late for Dunbar. He drowned trying to swim to shore.¹

Dunbar’s death was the latest in a macabre trend: the drowning and accident rate on Geneva Lake seemed to be increasing, mirroring a national trend. Just a few years earlier, the busy resort area had seen a run of high-profile tragedies. In a twelve-month period between Labor Day weekend 1912 and the same holiday the following year, the lake claimed the lives of several visitors. On September 5, 1912, twenty-one-year-old Princeton student Rufus Dawes drowned while swimming in the lake. His father, Charles G. Dawes, president of the Central Trust Company of Illinois and future vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge, scrambled to borrow a new lifesaving device called a pulmotor from General Electric. Ordering a special train from Chicago, he rushed the pulmotor to Lake Geneva in a futile attempt to save his son. It arrived several hours too late.² Then in June 1913, siblings Emma and Eric Olson and their friend Charles Strand drowned when their rowboat capsized as they returned from a picnic dinner on the south shore of the lake.³ Just a few weeks after that tragedy, three college students from Central College in Pella, Iowa—Gertrude Gazell, Cornelia De Guea, and Delia M. King—were visiting George Williams College Camp when their boat capsized and they drowned. Delia’s sister Lucy, the fourth passenger, was the only survivor.⁴

In fact, in 1914, the American Red Cross estimated that there were more than ten drowning deaths for every 100,000 people in the United States. By contrast, in 2014, that number was only 1.4 deaths per 100,000 people, a 90 percent reduction. Very few people in the early twentieth century learned to swim, and even more dangerously, women were compelled by modesty and social mores to take to the water in bulky wool swimming costumes that made swimming extremely difficult. “Commodore” Wilbert E. Longfellow was an early leader in promoting water safety at the national level, starting his career with the US Volunteer Lifesaving Corps, He remained with the American Red Cross for thirty-three years. In the 1950s, he remembered that “bathing beaches in 1900 were a far cry from the modern swimming resorts and pools of today. Women were swathed from chin to toe in clumsy suits that made swimming almost impossible. Beaches lacked rescue equipment and lifeguards frequently doubled as waiters. Rescue methods were mostly of the ‘bust ’em in the jaw and roll ’em over the barrel’ type.”