My father, Ronald Walter Cummings (the name we know him by), was born in 1906 in Oakland, California. He told me his mother was Spanish and a dancer and his father was in show business. After Dad died in Sydney, Australia in 1981, we did some searches of San Francisco records and found nothing. Dad is pictured in the photo on the left, and his parents are shown in the photo on the right.

Dad used to reminisce about San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. His parents put him into a Catholic boarding school while they toured in vaudeville. The nuns tied his left hand behind his back to try and make him write with his right hand. He came to Australia as a young man and we think he was a seaman or ship's hand and possibly worked in the kitchen. He never returned to the United States. In the 1930s, before my parents met, dad was an amateur boxer and had worked at the ski slopes around Mt. Kosciusko and at other alpine resorts. When I was a child, he took me to every musical that came to Sydney, the earliest of which was Showboat. My father had a lovely singing voice and was a very snappy dresser. He used to subscribe to the Saturday Evening Post when we were children.

I guess I will never find out my origins, but I wanted to share my story.

[If you have any information for Georgia, please email her directly.]