John Joseph Macionis ( ; May 27, 1916 – February 16, 2012) was an American competition swimmer who represented the United States at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Early life Born in Philadelphia, Macionis swam for Big Brothers, Germantown Y.M.C.A., and Central High School, where he captained the swim team and set a world's record in the 200-yard freestyle in 1933. He spent the next year at Mercersburg Academy (1934), where he swam under coach John "King" Miller and set two additional national freestyle records: According to school legend – as reported in the Mercersburg Magazine in Summer 2008 – it was Macionis who gave Miller the nickname "King". Continuing his swimming career at Yale University (1938), he swam under their legendary coach Bob Kiputh. Macionis was interviewed for the Mercersburg Academy oral history project in 2008 and recalled his single year at the academy. Macionis said he was the son of working class Lithuanian immigrants, who, in the midst of the Great Depression, could not afford the cost of tuition at the private boarding school. However, "I was able to go to Mercersburg because the people at Big Brothers thought I was a good kid" and academy swim coach John Miller wanted Macionis on his team: "And the head of the board, who was a Princeton man, said that it would be wonderful if someone from Big Brothers went to a good college. So they came up with $200 for Mercersburg. The minimum for Mercersburg was $400 at the time, but John Miller talked to the headmaster (Dr. Boyd Edwards) about my background." Eventually, because Edwards was so impressed with Macionis, the fee was reduced, and Mercersburg gained one of the greatest athletes in its history. The transition from Philadelphia's Central High School to Mercersburg was not easy: "I had to take all the College Board subjects and I flunked them all. No one at Central had even heard of the College Boards." Macionis said all he did in the 1933–34 academic year was swim and study, doing both well enough to gain acceptance at Yale University and, soon after, to win a spot on Yale's championship swim team. Yale University, swimming powerhouse In his first year at the New Haven, Connecticut school, he was part of a team of 18 Yale swimmers who created a new American record of 16 minutes 31 seconds in the one mile