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By
Carman
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Charles "Chuck" Cunningham ~
Charles Cunningham was born sometime in the 40's in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was a superstar athlete, a mathematic genius and a budding historian. But you probably don’t know who the hell he is or why he is a dead rebel anyway... Let me explain.
Chuck Cunningham made waves in his suburban world by becoming the first person to embrace a form of paganism long sought dead, the worship of Sekhmet. His parents, Howard and Marion, along with his preppy brother Richie, disowned him and kicked him to the motherfucking curb. His father, Howard - a strict Catholic, was heard saying that he wouldn’t have “no heathen for a son”, and he forbade anybody in the family to ever speak his name out loud again. Leaving home, Chuck went to Milwaukee’s gay district and started turning tricks for Joe McCarthy and his underlings during coke orgies. It is here that he first learned about Communism, and how it was the bane of American Society.
Reading everything he could get his hands on about Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, and other subversive -isms, he decided that the west coast was the place for him. So, he turned one last trick and decided it was time to hit the road. During his travels he met up with some radicals, including Donald DeFreeze, Sirhan Sirhan, Jerry Rubin, and Huey Newton. He always worked behind the scenes, writing speeches, organizing riots, and scheming other assorted general riff raff. Working like a puppet master, he became misanthropic, and started to slowly brainwash whoever he could lay his mind on.
In the 60's Chuck decided to join the Army and go to ‘Nam. While there he saw first hand the power of man en masse. When he made landfall, he quickly deserted and joined the Viet Cong in the honorable battle against the USA, eventually earning the respect of his fellow Vietnamese brethren and becoming a field commander in the gulf of Tonkin. After leading an unsuccessful attack on an American destroyer he was relived of his duties and banished from the country for life. It was at this time he decided that his work will ALWAYS be in the shadows from then on. That was where he worked his magic best.
Back in the states, he hit the road again. To him the highways were like the back of his hand. Chuck knew every crevice, back alley, county road, and deer path in this great nation. After criss-crossing the backwaters of obscure states he eventually made his way back to California for a while
Chuck was there when the SLA hideout burned to the ground. Chuck was there when RFK was shot. Chuck was in Chicago August 27 1968. If shit was going down, Chuck probably had his hand on the stirring spoon, always just leering and assuring people things would turn out in their favor. Eventually his notoriety for getting results became legendary in counter culture circles. His ruthlessness was the stuff of legends.
1968 was a busy year for him, but Chuck still found time to make his way to San Francisco to check out the scene, and there he found new ways to amuse himself. He put forth the claim that he was “collecting souls for the afterlife”. For some of you this may sound familiar. He called himself The Zodiac in letters to the police and press, taunting them that they would never catch him… and they never did.
Some time later, he was back in Ohio, and under a fake name he joined the National Guard. Quickly gaining rank he became a commander, and in May of 1971 he got orders to disperse a protest of the Vietnam War. Flashing a sadist smile, he told his troops to use live rounds. It should be noted that the night before he had burned down the old ROTC building to get some blood boiling amongst the troops.
After this incident, Charles decided he wanted to go out with a bang. He spent most of the remainder of the year preparing, and on November 24th, 1971, one Dan Cooper boarded flight 305 from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. After a sensational finale he made off with $200,000 and was never heard from again.
What a hardcore rebel. Bad-ass to the core.
Little known fact is that, throughout all this time, he secretly kept in touch with his sister, Joanie, through letters sent to a certain Arthur Fonzarelli, detailing what he had been up to lately. In his very last letter to her, he told his sister that her marriage to Chachi would only end in failure. He added a passage from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men”:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
So think what you want about Richie, Potsie, Ralph, or even Fonzie jumping a shark wearing a leather jacket. Chuck Cunningham was one cool son of a bitch.
