Pat Brown’s Fame Not So Fleeting After All : She’s Named to the Swimming Hall of Fame for Her Record-Breaking Career

When Patty Caretto was a girl of 13, she swam to world fame.

There are headlines that say so.

She was called a swimming phenom, a tiny lass, an American star and a queen for a day in newspaper stories. In her 10-year career, she set six world freestyle records. She met Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco and swam in the palace pool. She taught the children of then-Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos to swim when she was invited to the country to visit. And she was still a Whittier High School senior when her career ended in 1968.

Today her fame does not extend even to all of the seven schools in the Garden Grove Unified School District, where she teaches physical education to children with motor-skill deficiencies or learning disabilities. She is known by her married name, Pat Brown.

Brown retired from swimming at 17 after a disappointing fifth-place finish in the 800-meter freestyle at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. She was tired of training, tired of missing out on being a teen-ager.

“I tried to get back into it a few months after the Olympics,” said Brown, who lives in Fountain Valley. “But I was tired. I was very tired.”

And she had fallen in love with a classmate she married three years later while she was a student at Cal State Long Beach.

She does not think often of her swimming career now. Nor does she swim, or at least not much more than splashing around with the two children she has with Sam Brown, her second husband.

“It’s real difficult to get back in the pool and swim lap after lap after you’ve trained for a long time,” said Brown, who does aerobics and rides a stationary bike for exercise.

But although she hardly thinks or speaks of her swimming career other than to glance occasionally at the scrapbook compiled by her mother, Virginia Caretto of Mission Viejo, she likely will relive many of those days of fame and childhood this weekend. Today, she and 10 others will be inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame at Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

Among the other inductees are Jennifer Chandler, a 1976 Olympic gold medalist in springboard diving who trained under Ron O’Brien at Mission Viejo and now lives in Arizona, and Bruce Furniss of Los Angeles, formerly of Santa Ana, who won 1976 Olympic gold medals in the 200-meter freestyle and the 4 X 200-meter freestyle relay.

Brown, now 36, was 13 on July 30, 1964, when she set her first two world records in one race in the Amateur Athletic Union national championships at Foothill College. She swam the 1,500-meter freestyle in 18 minutes 30.5 seconds that day, a time just two-tenths off the time that won the men’s gold medal for American Ford Konno in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. She shattered the women’s world record--then held by Carolyn House--by 13.5 seconds. Brown, then 5-feet 1-inch and 102 pounds, set a world record for 800 meters in the same race.

Barely an adolescent, Brown was remarkably full of grace and poise, except on the day she first set a world record, when she burst into tears briefly in the face of flashing cameras and badgering reporters. She had a trademark stroke--which became known as a windmill stroke--that combined accelerated arm strokes with decreased kicks, creating a unique visual style and helping to make up for the disadvantage of her size. She often wore a straw hat decorated with a car rental company advertisement button that read, “We try harder.” In short, she was precisely in the mold of the pixie adolescents--Nadia Comaneci may be the best example--who suddenly capture the attention of the world in Olympic years with their winsome ways and youthful talents.

But Brown, who was coached by Don Gambril, the 1984 U.S. Olympic coach and longtime University of Alabama coach, did not go to the 1964 Olympics.

She was a distance swimmer, excelling in the 800 meters and the 1,500. But in 1964, the longest race for women was 400 meters. Brown missed making the Olympic team in the 400 meters by one person.

“She was the only world-record holder who didn’t go to the Olympics in 1964,” Virginia Caretto remembers.

“Who knows what might have happened if they had the mile?” said Brown.

The lack of Olympic success, the lack of a medal, may be the only thing that causes Brown any regret about her career.

She did go to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, but finished fifth in the newly added 800-meter race after struggling with illness.

When she returned to Whittier, she stopped swimming, but for a brief time with the high school team and one disappointing college season.

She has hardly looked back.

“I had world records,” Brown said. “But I don’t go around saying, ‘Hey, here I am.’ . . . It was just such an experience. Being so young and doing all those things.”

‘I had world records. But I don’t go around saying, ‘Hey, here I am.’ . . . It was just such an experience. Being so young and doing all those things.’