Johnny Weissmuller

Not until after his death in 1984 did the full truth about Weissmuller's origins emerge. Throughout his lifetime, he claimed to have been born Peter John Weissmuller, the son of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, on July 2, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania mining town of Windber, near Johnstown. Olympic historian David Wallechinsky uncovered credible evidence in the 1980s that Weissmuller had in fact been born in Freidorf, Austria-Hungary, now a part of Romania, and was brought to the United States shortly after his birth. Wallechinsky further contended that Weissmuller's parents later switched his identity with that of his Americanborn brother, Peter, to qualify their older son to compete on the U.S. Olympic swimming team.

The Weissmullers did not linger long in Windber, where Johnny's father toiled in the coal mines to scratch out an existence for his family. By 1908 they had relocated to Chicago, where Weissmuller's father owned and operated a neighborhood tavern while his mother cooked in the city's famous Turn-Verein restaurant. Johnny was enrolled in St. Michael's Parochial School. He later attended Chicago's Menier Public School but quit after completing the eighth grade when his father died of tuberculosis, probably contracted during his years as a coal miner in Pennsylvania.

To help support his family, Weissmuller worked as a bellhop and elevator operator at Chicago's Plaza Hotel. In his spare time, he and younger brother Peter, both avid swimmers, joined the Stanton Park pool, where Johnny won all the junior swim meets in which he competed. At the age of twelve, he lied about his age to win a berth on the local YMCA swim team. During the summer, he spent every spare moment at Chicago's Oak Street Beach, where he and Peter pulled twenty people from the waters of Lake Michigan after a boating accident. Only eleven of those they rescued survived the

Johnny Weissmuller

mishap. The incident impressed upon Weissmuller the importance of learning to swim at an early age.