ABOUT GEORGE
George Cunningham comes from a long line of story tellers and prevaricators. He spent his children sitting around the living room on Sunday nights, drinking Coca Cola out of the bottle, listening to his grandfather pass down stories to his sons and their families, hearing his father and uncles tell their own stories, each one trying to top the other, and learning as a kid how to take the humor and bitter-sweet tragedy of life and weave it into a good tale.
George grew up on the West Coast of Florida, where he spent many happy hours dipping his toes into the warm waters of Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. He was a late bloomer who didn’t graduate from the University of Florida until he was 29.
As a young man, he worked as a survey crew chief, a civil engineering aide, a short-order cook, a painter, a laborer, a construction inspector, a gardener and a seltzer bottle washer.
After graduation he worked as an editor, a copy editor, a layout man, a columnist, a police reporter, a business reporter, and a feature writer. He and his wife Carmela started their own publication, The Cunningham Report, which covered West Coast ports for 15 years.
George served three years in the U.S. Army, including a year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He saw combat in the jungles of the Iron Triangle, the Central Highlands, and the Mekong Delta. He was wounded in War Zone D.
Along the way, he grew to hate the politicians and generals and industrial leaders on both sides, who had unleashed the dogs of war for their own ambition, profit, and ego.
Despite such revulsion, he remains proud of his service, proud that when the country needed brave young men to confront its enemies, he did not shirk. He would make the same choice again.
George came to California in 1969 and immediately fell in love with the state. He worked at the South Bay Daily Breeze, City News Service, the Orange County Register, and the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
George Cunningham is now an old man, who has worked a lot of jobs, but never had a career. He is a writer because he has to be. There are new stories to tell, new ways to tell them and new people to tell them too. He will write until he dies.
There were things he once believed that were nonsense. There are things he still believes that are undoubtedly wrong. He is still learning about himself and where he fits and does not fit into an ever-changing world. But he is 84 years old, and his time is both limited and precious.
You can read about his thoughts on life, death, friendship and love, right here.
His books include the novels Kaboom and The Big Story, and three books that he co-authored with his wife Carmela: The history book, Port Town, and two books of biographic anecdotes, On the Sunny Side of the Street and Come Rain or Come Shine.
And – God willing – there is more to come.
ABOUT MY VERY SPECIAL WOMAN
Carmela Lyn Castorina Cunningham is my wife, my lover, my friend, my muse, my critic, my nag, my nurse, my guardian against all enemies, my defender, an avid get-down-in-the dirt gardener, and the only reason I still walk the earth.
When I was wounded in Vietnam, Carmela was in third grade.
She has worked selling classified ads over the phone for the Orange County Register, as a business manager, writer, and editor at the Long Beach Business Reporter, as a public relations and internal newsletter editor at Rockwell International. She edited books by business guru Ichak Adizes. There was the time she rose in the wee hours of the morning to manage newspaper deliverers and fill in for them when they were sick. During this same period, she attended UCLA, where she studied Medieval History, focusing on relations between Venice and the Rome, during the Crusades.
She graduated in 1991 with honors.
She returned to UCLA in 1999 to manage their disabilities and computing program. She co-wrote a book, “Information Access and Adaptive Technology” on how computers can be used to overcome disabilities. She went on to direct a team of computer technologists who supported scientific research at UCLA.
She was a boss, who protected and respected her staff. When they fell short, she would admonish them, but she refused to scape-goat them to the people to whom she answered. And all along the way, she changed lives of both the people she worked with and the clients who they served.
But her biggest success may have been the man she fell in love with when she was 22 years old – an unhappy 37-year-old man with a drinking problem and a serious death wish. She took that unhappy man and made him better than he was.
That man is old now. He wakes up every morning with aches and pains, he bleeds at the slightest scrape or cut, and he looks forward to each and every day.
He is still far from perfect, but he is still learning, still working hard – whether it’s tilling the soil in the garden or writing or taking out the garbage. And he is happier than he has ever been in his life.
Thanks to one special woman: Carmela Lyn Castorina Cunningham.