Odd this day
Well, it’s the 75th anniversary of the birth of David W Cummings in Rochester, NY. You may not have heard of him, or at least not by that name, because, tragically, he was only to reach public consciousness after his early demise in 2014, when this obituary appeared in the Tampa Bay Times of 16 April:
Remarkably, this image, which saw a fair amount of exposure at the time, was not a fake. A couple of days later, the Democrat and Chronicle asked the question everyone online had been posting for 48 hours:
They weren’t the last people to pose the question, but they were the first (that I could find) to remark:
Perhaps the strangest thing about David W. ‘Pervert Dave’ Cummings’ story is that no one knows how he got the nickname. It’s not clear he even knew himself — though the name never bothered him.
…and of all the other articles on the subject I could find, none got closer to the answer. The fullest account of the man’s “colorful, tragic life” came a few more days later, back in the Tampa Bay Times. Cummings had been an Air Force mechanic, and
claimed to have been aboard three planes that were shot down in Vietnam. He was honorably discharged in 1970 for a character disorder, the details of which are not known. He suffered from post-traumatic stress.
Then, in “a 13-month period in the late 1980s”, he killed two people.
One was a guy known as Wheelchair Skip, an amputee roommate in Inglis he shot six times during an argument over money. He was also charged with driving under the influence manslaughter when a woman who was riding with him died after Mr. Cummings slammed into a tree.
He claimed self-defense in the shooting death of Furman W. Toney III, the amputee who had his own violent history. (Six months earlier, Toney had fired a sawed-off shotgun at an imaginary intruder, instead hitting a 5-year-old girl in the face; she was not seriously injured.)
He also found time to be married three times, including once to a 17-year-old when he was 32. The Tampa Bay Times remarks drily:
While this seems to be a potential source for Pervert, friends say he was given the name much earlier in life.
So, they were right about colourful. We might be tempted to suggest that the ‘tragedy’ element of his life largely happened to other people, but to be fair to Dave, PTSD from military conflict is not exactly a picnic, and he lost his third wife when she was just 52. He spent a total of three years in prison for the deaths he caused, and was apparently “very remorseful”.
The friend who said this also told the paper that the nickname was
just something he came back with from Vietnam.
One might imagine that someone with such a name, and with a long grey beard, living in “an isolated home in the woods”, and who was
adept at engraving images into wood, including a skeleton riding a motorcycle
might have been the subject of remarks before his death, but we must remind ourselves: he was living in Florida, and all this is not especially out of the ordinary there. Mind you, there’s Florida, and there’s Florida, and by the sound of it, Dave lived in the latter. Gawker recycled the Tampa Bay Times piece later the same day, adding its own flourish by describing his location as
Citrus County, two hours (and about twenty years) away from Tampa.
(Yes, this is a bit silly, but I haven’t had time for proper research/writing for a while. Normal service may resume shortly.)
