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GREENSBORO — Bob Sawyer had been there before.

On Saturday, he stood in front of at least 2,100 families at Lindley Pool and carried out what he has done for the past 36 years — announce the totals of a fundraiser inextricably linked to our Greensboro summer.

Swim for Cancer.

The city’s 23 swimming teams write letters and go door to door. But they also sell lemonade, swim laps, wash dogs, bake frog-shaped cakes and pummel people with pies loaded with whipped cream.

“Cream the Coach.’’ That’s what they call it at Hamilton Lakes Swim and Tennis Club .

All for a quarter. All in fun. All for the American Cancer Society. And it all started in Greensboro.

Swim for Cancer is the American Cancer Society’s longest-running community fundraiser in the country — before Relay for Life, before the Great American Smokeout, before anything else.

Its blueprint is one other cities follow. Why? Just track the money.

In 1973, the first year, Swim for Cancer raised $3,000. This summer, two individual swimmers each raised more than that by themselves as Swim for Cancer raked in $162,352 and surpassed the $2.5 million mark.

That’s a lot of quarters.

Every summer since eight-track tapes were popular, Swim for Cancer has engaged generations of Greensboro swimmers and taught them firsthand about community service.

Ask the swimmers why they do it, and they’ll mention first names. Grandma Roonie. Mom B. Aunt Barbara. Dad.

For them, cancer has become personal. And they all have a story.

Catherine Cecchini is 22, a rising senior at Appalachian State. She coaches the Hamilton Lakes Hornets, a team she started swimming for when she was 8.

She’s always participated in Swim for Cancer for Walter Samuel Rogers , coach, teacher and school superintendent. Rogers was her “Granddaddy.’’ Cancer took him at age 89.

Parker Deaton is 8, a rising third-grader at Guilford Day School. He swims for the Greensboro Country Club Blue Dolphins and raises money because he wants to find a cure.

His maternal grandmother, Betty Strange, died of breast cancer. His maternal grandfather, Grady Strange, died of lymphoma. Parker never knew them.

“I’m doing this so my kids won’t have one set of grandparents,’’ he tells his mom.

Ava Dodge also is 8. She’s a rising third-grader at Canterbury School, and she swims for the Lake Jeanette Lightning. She raises money by swimming laps with foam lightning bolts attached to her back.

Each lightning bolt carries a name. One of those names is Paul Dodge, her dad.

Nearly three years ago, doctors removed a five-pound malignant tumor from Dodge’s right leg. Next week, he’ll start chemotherapy once again. Doctors found lesions on his lungs, liver and left kidney.

“I want to help him,’’ Ava says in a tiny voice. “I don’t want him to have cancer.’’

That brings us to Saturday and the conclusion of the three-day City Meet, a contest spearheaded by the Greensboro Swim Association that’s more than a half-century old.

As the city’s swim teams finished parading around the pool, Bob Sawyer found his usual spot on the other end, rattled off totals and thought about a swimmer long gone from the lanes.

John Dewey. He died of cancer. He was only 18 .

Sawyer started coaching John Dewey when he was 8. Even back then, Sawyer remembers the mark on Dewey’s arm. It was no bigger than a raisin. It grew to the size of a dried grape.

Doctors had a name for it: lymphoma.

When he was a Grimsley freshman, Dewey had the growth removed. He worked hard to regain his strength and his stroke. He did it well — well enough to win state in the 100-yard freestyle as a junior.

He beat everyone. But he couldn’t beat cancer.

By the time he was a senior, he got sick again. He tried to compete, even at the Southeastern Swimming and Diving Championship, a competition at Atlanta’s Emory University with 100 other schools and 1,000 other swimmers.

Dewey shouldn’t have. Still, he did.

“If you let me stay in that relay,’’ John Dewey told Sawyer, “I think I’ve got one more good swim left.’’

Grimsley’s relay team won. Dewey came back to Greensboro, sitting beside Sawyer in the front seat, with a bag by his side in case he vomited.

“John,’’ Sawyer told his swimmer as he drove. “It’s going to be all right.’’

It was February 1971. By April, John Dewey was gone.

Today, you see Dewey’s name around Greensboro. It’s attached to a swim meet, a student-athlete award at Grimsley High and a bronze plaque outside the school’s swimming pool that bears his name.

It’s also attached to Swim for Cancer.

In early 1973, a woman with the local chapter of the American Cancer Society asked Sawyer if he would be willing to help start a fundraiser.

He said yes. He’d do it for Dewey. He remembered what he wrote right after Dewey’s death for Grimsley’s yearbook, The Whirligig: “May the memory of his purpose and direction in life remain with us in our struggle to succeed in something worthwhile.’’

That, it seems, has come true with Swim for Cancer.

“It is a living memorial to John Dewey,’’ Sawyer, Grimsley’s retired swim coach and athletics director, said from his house the other day. “The fact that it’s miraculously sustained itself and still going strong after it started out almost at random.

“And now, it’s come to this,’’ said Sawyer, 72. “I always say John fought to the last breath, and I hope I’ll be that tough at the very end — to have the courage to stand tall and never give up. That’s a lesson for us all.’’

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com