Clara Lamore Walker — who competed in the 1948 Olympics — may be 82 years old, but she swims thousands of yards almost every day.

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The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

A lot of water has splashed over the side of the pool since Rhode Island last sent a swimmer to the Olympic Games.

It’s been 60 years … six decades … a lifetime, really.

There’s no more graphic illustration of how long ago it was and how dramatically times (including those recorded by the swimmers) have changed than to look at Elizabeth Beisel today, in her high-tech, Speedo LZR Racer suit, as she prepares for the Games of the XXIXth Olympiad this month in Beijing. And then to think of Clara Lamore, swimming lap after lap at the Olneyville Boys Club wearing a cotton suit that absorbed water as she trained to go to the Olympics in war-ravaged London in 1948.

She’s Clara Lamore Walker now, the widow of a former Navy test pilot, Donald Walker. She’s 82 years old, swims thousands of yards almost every day, and is as excited as anyone this side of the Beisel family that the tremendously talented , 15-year-old Elizabeth is a bona fide medal contender in both the 400 individual medley and the 200 backstroke.

“I’m elated she made the team,” Walker said. “She seems like a really nice kid.”

Clara is old enough to be Elizabeth’s grandmother — or even great-grandmother. It’s been that long since Rhode Island has produced a world-class swimmer.

Why that is could be the subject of a different, and longer, story. For now, it’s enough to say that it’s only once every few generations that people as talented, and as driven, as Clara Lamore Walker and Elizabeth Beisel come along.

“Swimming was everything to me,” Walker said. “I did nothing else.”

For several years during and after World War II, no woman in America swam any better. Freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke — it didn’t matter, Walker seldom, if ever, lost.

She was 22 in 1948 when she finished third in the breaststroke at the Olympic Trials in Detroit. The finals were on a Sunday and, two days later, she and her teammates embarked on an ocean liner for the eight-day trip across the Atlantic to England.

Well, not quite all her teammates.

“The male swimmers flew over,” she said. “That’s the way it was in those days.”

There was a pool aboard ship, but the vessel was pitching and rolling so much in the heavy seas of the north Atlantic that the swimmers weren’t allowed to use it.

Still, Walker recalled, it was a pleasant voyage. She met Harrison Dillard, a great runner who won the gold medal in the 100-yard dash in London, then came back four years later and won the 110-meter hurdles at Helsinki — the only man ever to accomplish that double.

Also on board was the family of Joseph P. Kennedy.

“We were in awe of them,” Walker recalled.

It was an unforgettable experience for a little — she’s only 5-foot-2 — lady from Providence.

Originally, Walker had wanted to be an ice skater, the next Sonja Henie.

“I could do anything on skates,” she said. “I was a real daredevil.”

But skating was expensive. Equipment, costumes, and ice time were costly. It was the midst of the Depression, and her father was a mailman. So she had to give up that dream.

“I was devastated,” she said.

Then she discovered swimming. A friend took her to the pool at the Olneyville Boys Club, where legendary coach Joe Watmough had developed the great John Higgins, who set a world record in the 200-meter butterfly at the 1936 Olympic Trials, and later was, for many years, the swimming coach at the U.S. Naval Academy.

From that point on, Walker was seldom out of the water.

She won national junior championships, then national women’s championships, and, in 1948, found herself in London as a member of the U.S. Olympic Team.

“The world was just getting back together,” she said. “The city was still bombed out. There were shortages of food and gasoline.”

Although she didn’t win a medal, Walker made the finals in the 200 breaststroke, finishing sixth. Afterward, she and some of her teammates went on to Paris and competed there, wearing what she calls “drag suits — they hung when they got wet.”

After she returned home, Walker didn’t swim again for 30 years. Deeply religious, she entered a cloistered convent.

“That’s why I talk so much now,” she laughs. “I’m still making up for lost time.”

Walker left the convent after seven years and met her husband at the Officers Club at the Naval Air Station at Quonset Point. They traveled extensively but, after he died in 1970, she returned to Rhode Island and became a teacher, and later a guidance counselor, at Western Hills Junior High in Cranston.

She was in her 50s when, on the advice of her doctor, she got back into the pool, using swimming as therapy for a bad back.

It was if she’d never left.

If she was going to swim, she was going to swim fast. She became the country’s best female Masters swimmer, winning age-group title after age-group title while setting literally hundreds of records — years of dominating performances that, in 1995, resulted in her becoming the first Masters woman to be inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Even as an octogenarian, she still exudes enough energy, not merely to light up a room, but to illuminate the entire state.

She’s excited about watching Beisel compete in Beijing — as well as four years from now, when the Olympic Games return to London.

“Elizabeth seems like a confident young woman,” Walker said. “She may have two more Olympics ahead of her. The Games in China aren’t her first international competition. She swam in the world championships in Australia last year. For a 15-year-old from Rhode Island, she’s already done an awful lot.”

It’s taken 60 years, but the nation’s smallest state has finally produced a swimmer in a class with Clara Lamore Walker.

jdonalds@projo.com