“If I Might Make a Suggestion”
Reflections on the Life of Gordon J. Cummings
As delivered by Tom Cummings at Gordon’s funeral Mass on Saturday, April 9, 2005 at Our Lady of the Lake Church, King Ferry, NY.
To do a proper eulogy for Gordon Cummings, one would want some help. You’d want to be able to turn to a thoughtful person who could help you understand what it was like to grow up in a poor and sometimes troubled family. Someone whose early education was disrupted frequently by a hard-drinking father who changed jobs with the seasons. You’d want to talk to a World War Two veteran, who had seen some of the world at its worst. Someone who, thanks to the GI Bill, was able to complete his education, join the faculty of a great American university. Marry and raise family. Most of all you’d want someone who treasured life in the rural byways, small hamlets, villages and towns of the Finger Lakes region. You’d like to talk with someone who cared so much about so many aspects of the life of his community that he made its life his own.
I don’t need to tell you that person is no longer available to help us.
Gordon Cummings was born on April 30, 1919 just a couple of miles east of here on the family farm that was first owned by his grandfather - an Irish immigrant - and later by Gordon’s parents Pete and Ida. At this point, I can almost hear my father say, “If I might make a suggestion.” That was one of his favorite ways of gently leading me and many others to consider a different course of action. “If I might make a suggestion,” he would say, “why don’t you put that birth date in context. What was the world like in 1919?” All right. In 1919 the world was finishing the Great War, signing the Treaty at Versailles. In the U.S., a gallon of gasoline cost fifteen cents, the Dow Jones Average was 107. Prohibition became the law of the land that year. And the life expectancy of a baby boy born 1919 was a mere 54 years. Improved access to healthcare brought infant mortality rates way down and that’s the main factor in helping many of those babies live into their mid-eighties. It’s a digression, but not too far afield when remembering a man who devoted much his life to improving health care in rural communities.
Back to 1923. December. The Genoa Tribune reports “Peter Cummings and family left last week for Ithaca where they will spend the winter.” Now, if you didn’t know better you might think that sounds like a society column article about a wealthy family leaving their summer vacation estate for their mansion in the city. However, the Genoa Tribune didn’t have a society page. And that move was the first of many for Gordon’s father who couldn’t find financial success in city or country. The pattern of constantly moving between Ithaca and King Ferry … disrupting his family and his children’s educations … would continued through the end of the decade.
Gordon Cummings made his First Holy Communion at Immaculate Conception Church in Ithaca. On the back of your program, you’ll see his First Communion picture. The suit he’s wearing in that picture was purchased for him by neighbors who took a liking to young Gordon and felt sorry for him because his family couldn’t afford to buy him a suit.
Later when he wrote about his experiences in the Ithaca city schools, he remembered fifth grade this way, “I arrived late in the term that year. And I was the only child in farm clothes and boots. (It’s amazing what people will remember about their childhood and what will affect them for years to come. Sometimes for their entire life.) Pop remembered his fifth grade teacher, Velda Ackley this way. When she “learned that my grade school education had been disrupted by all this moving back and forth between country and city, she made an extra effort to help me catch up. After I had moved back to the country for the last time she wrote frequent letters of encouragement. Letters that I kept and reread for years until I left home for college.”
That last move back to King Ferry came about because his father, Pete decided that 1929 would be a good year to go into farming full-time. But 1929 was the beginning of the Great Depression and the beginning of the end for farming in the Cummings family.
I don’t want to over-emphasize the bleakness of his early years. They weren’t that much different from most of the people he grew up with. His high school yearbook paints a picture of a happy young man who was listed as “The Cleverest,” The Wittiest,” “(The One) Who Can Spin the Best Yarn.” “(The One, along with Jerry Mahaney) Who Has the Most Pull With The Faculty,” “The Best Actor,” and “The Best Looking.”
In 1936 Pop graduated from King Ferry High School, and thanks to the encouragement of several teachers, the next year he began studies at Cornell University. He had to work full time while going to school and he said his grades showed the result of not enough time spent with coursework.
After two and an half years, he took a break to consider his future. He moved to New Jersey for a short while where he sold fuel oil and drove a delivery truck. He attended flight school, suffered a ruptured appendix and eventually returned to Ithaca. As with so many of the greatest generation, World War II intervened to interrupt any plans of returning to college.
He enlisted in the Army and served as a Special Agent with the Counter Intelligence Corps in the Pacific Theater. He fought in the Battle of Okinawa. Was on the ground in Nagasaki, Japan just five days after the atomic bomb destroyed that city. In post-war Japan he conducted surveillance and interrogation activities. I’m sure he never forgot Pearl Harbor, but I never heard him say anything but kind words about the Japanese people. He came to appreciate many aspects of their culture.
After the war, Gordon returned to Cornell, this time on the G.I. Bill. In rapid succession, he earned his Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. in Sociology and Cultural Anthropology.
One summer’s day an allergic reaction to a bee sting brought him to the emergency room at Tompkins County Hospital. There he met a nurse, Jane Powers. They were married in 1950.
In April of 1953 Jane and Gordon moved from Ithaca to King Ferry, just up Route 90, next to Hank and Lu Britt. When Pop met the school nurse and learned that there was no doctor in the community, he organized the “Ridgeland Doctor Project.”
In 1954 he joined the Cornell faculty in the College of Agriculture’s Department of Rural Sociology.
Greg, Dan and I were born while the family lived here in King Ferry. Molly came along after we moved to the new house three miles to the south on Route 34-B.
In 1974, Gordon organized and became first President of the Board of the Community Medical Center in Aurora.
In 1975, he spent one of his Sabbatical leaves from Cornell with the New York State Health Department in Albany organizing Comprehensive Health Planning and community mammogram centers for breast cancer screening.
In 1983 he retired from Cornell after 30 years of service.
He was named the first Historian for the Town of Genoa and he became the first President of the Board of Directors for the Genoa Historical Association.
In retirement, he traveled a little, but was never happy for too long, too far from here.
For a great many years, there wasn’t very much that went on in his community that he didn’t have a hand in. Schools, Health Care, Economic Development, Church, Politics, you name it. Gordon Cummings was standing up, taking the lead, and offering a suggestion or two.
I’ve heard about a time in the early 1960’s when addressed a school board meeting to ask if he might offer a suggestion to improve the reading curriculum in the school. He used us, his own children, as an example of how students were reading too many comic books and not enough school assigned reading.
At our family dinner table and at many a community meeting or informal gathering, you knew things were about to get interesting when he said, “If I make a suggestion.”
We need local medical care. We need a newspaper. How can we promote tourism? How will we develop the next generation of leaders? How about a museum, a one-room schoolhouse, a barn, a ferryboat? Have you considered this? What do you think about that?
If I might make a suggestion.
As a youngster, with schoolwork or chores around the house when we heard him say, “Might I make a suggestion?” We took that to mean. “It’s good but maybe it could be better. Don’t be satisfied with just good enough.”
His suggestion was almost always a good one. And it often would lead to seeing other possibilities as well. I’m glad we’re doing this eulogy now. When we were teenagers, we didn’t always appreciate his suggestions. I’m sure I must have disappointed him many times.
Through the years, his advice and good counsel were sought and valued by us and by many of you in this church this morning. But often he didn’t wait to be asked for advice. He wasn’t shy about offering his opinion. If he saw something that he thought needed doing, phone calls were made, meetings were organized, plans were put into motion. He would never tell you exactly what to do, but it was clear from his suggestion what he thought. And it was clear that he had probably done a good deal of thinking about the matter at hand.
Not to say his ideas for the community were always popular. Sometimes his suggestions didn’t work. But you could always count on a thoughtful approach. There was always a mind at work. He was always fully engaged. Never completely satisfied. And certainly never self-satisfied. He did what he thought was right, without much concern for how well liked he might be. But he was well liked. And well loved. It’s hard to believe he’s gone.
To say that his leadership will be missed is an understatement. His smile, his humor, his friendship and good-natured enthusiasm will be missed just as much or more.
Gordon Cummings prided himself on staying close to his roots, but he grew a long way from his humble beginnings. His life shaped him. And he helped shape the life of the community he loved.
That brings me to the end of this brief, thumbnail sketch. It’s sad to come to the end, because this time I know I’m not going to hear him say, “If I might make a suggestion.”
No more suggestions? Then how will we know if we’re done? When will we know if it’s good enough?
Of course, we’re done when our time is up. A long life, well lived. It’s never perfect, but it’s the best we can do. And on a beautiful spring day in King Ferry, New York, that’s more than good enough.
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