John Cunningham

Cunns

If most of the faculty had chosen sides in this ideological battle, there was one sterling exception. Dr. Edward Philpot Mumford, a practicing Anglican, came from a long family line of medical researchers, one of whom helped establish Britain’s Royal College of Physicians in the sixteenth century. Dr. Mumford had a staggering array of credentials, including a doctorate from Oxford, fellowships from Oxford and Cambridge, and numerous awards for his academic work on parasitology in the Near and Middle East.  He even had a beetle named after him. Between research projects on mosquitoes and rats, he taught freshman biology at Dominican College in San Rafael and at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park. Dr. Mumford was a classic example of the sincere, but absent-minded professor. He adopted the traditional lecture method in his teaching, reading his often-abstruse notes to us at such a rapid gait that no one, not even “Sincerity-Gone-Wild” Murnane, could keep up with him. At a certain point in the lecture, when the entire class was totally lost, John Cunningham would wave his hand and say, “Doctor, could you please read your notes a little faster?” Doctor Mumford would say, “Eh…all right,” adjust the glasses that were always down at the end of his nose, find where he had left off in his notes, and start reading at an even faster rate.  

When Dr. Mumford wasn’t lecturing, he was either showing us 8 mm films or attempting to get us to do experiments in the adjoining lab. The films were always fun because every time Doctor would turn his back, John Cunningham, who ran the projector, would reverse the direction of the film and we would be watching fish swimming backwards or severed cells miraculously reuniting. Sometimes these reversals would last 10 minutes or more before Dr. Mumford would finally notice that something didn’t look right.

Much like in the prison system, the seminary hierarchy was not confined to the faculty, but extended down to students, who, if they showed leadership abilities, were awarded “house jobs.” These were positions of responsibility and authority, which implied that the recipient had found favor in the eyes of the faculty. Jobs such as librarian, sacristan, master of ceremonies, keyboy, infirmarian and bellboy were highly coveted. The job of keyboy was perhaps the most strategic – and the most subject to abuse. The keyboy held the keys to almost every room in the house, and was responsible for making sure that everything was locked and unlocked at the proper time. Normally, the faculty chose the most reliable and mature candidate they could find for this job, but, in our class, they inexplicably chose John Cunningham, the class’s equivalent to G. Gordon Liddy. John parlayed his keyboy job into a position of great power and influence, using his keys to obtain copies of tests, raid the faculty refrigerator and provide his friends access to any room in the house. Unlike his Watergate counterpart, he never got convicted, though he had a few close calls, like the time Dr. Mumford woke up from a nap to find Cunningham and McLaughlin in his study, looking for a copy of the upcoming biology test. John quickly covered himself, holding up his clipboard and apologizing for interrupting the doctor’s nap, but explaining that they were there taking wall dimensions, since the maintenance crew was going to be painting his room soon.

“I see,” replied the ever-gullible Doctor. “Thanks very much.”