A 26-year-old unemployed Jewish actress last night became the first person to swim twice around Manhattan Island, completing the two 28-mile round trips in about 21 1/2 hours.
Julie Ridge, who last performed in the long-running Broadway musical “Oh Calcutta,” emerged from the polluted East River about 7:45 p.m. last night. She entered the river at 10:45 p.m. Sunday and treaded water between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. yesterday to allow for tide changes.
Emerging from the water last night, Ridge told reporters, “I feel terrific. I wanted to do something no one has ever done and there are not many things left in life you can be first at”.
Ridge, born in Arlington, Va., gave up her role in the Broadway musical last year to train for a swim across the English Channel, which she completed September 10 in 18 hours, becoming the 242nd person to have made the crossing. The record time for the Channel swim is held by Penny Lee Dean, an American, in 7 hours and 40 minutes.
PROUD OF HER JEWISH HERITAGE
In an interview last November with JTA sports columnist Haskell Cohen, Ridge noted her intentions to attempt the swim around Manhattan Island, a particularly hazardous challenge due to the river’s treacherous currents. She also spoke of her Jewish upbringing.
“I was Bas Mitzvahed at the age of 13, went to Hebrew school, I read Hebrew but I do not speak it fluently,” Ridge said. “I went to Israel four years ago with my dad who took me over as a graduation present upon completing my courses at Boston University. We stayed there about a month.”
A graduate in 1978 from the university’s Fine Arts Department, Ridge made her way to New York and started working in advertising and then finally, after four to five months, landed a role in a theater production. The first one was a huge musical review in Hershey, Pennsylvania, called “Pennsylvania, U.S.A.”
As for the Manhattan swim, in which she was clad in a striped one-piece bathing suit, Ridge said she hoped her efforts would help her acting career and that the publicity might draw some offers of acting jobs. “I’d love to do soap operas, commercials, anything in acting,” she said yesterday.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
