Early Years, Family, Education, Military
Cummings was born in the previous Methodist Hospital in Houston to Glen Souter Cummings and the former Florella Vera. He was descended from William Cummings, one of the three hundred families originally settled in Texas by Stephen F. Austin. His mother was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Cummings attended Woodrow Wilson Elementary and Sidney Lanier Middle schools and graduated at the age of sixteen in 1942 from Mirabeau B. Lamar Senior High School. He then attended Lon Morris College, a Methodist-affiliated junior college in Jacksonville in east Texas for the spring semester of 1943. He and an older brother, Glenn Malcolm Cummings, thereafter joined the United States Merchant Marine Cadet Corps. Cummings recalled having marched down Canal Street in New Orleans during the Armistice Day parade on November 11, 1943. In New Orleans just after Christmas 1943, Cummings boarded his first ship, the S.S. Delmar, built at Hog Island, Pennsylvania. In 1945, he graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point on Long Island, New York, having procured a license to sail as a Third Officer on any merchant ship in any ocean and a commission as an ensign in the United States Naval Reserve.
After the war, Cummings attended the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Houston and accumulated enough semester hours to earn a bachelor of science degree in transportation. On June 25, 1949, at the First Methodist Church of Houston, Cummings married the former Dorothy Hensley (born August 23, 1929, in Newnan, Georgia), a receptionist and switchboard operator. The couple had two children, David Malcolm Cummings (born 1950) and Karen Ann Cummings Garrett (born 1952), and two grandsons, Russell Bennett Lang and Carl Thompson Norwood.
Read more about this topic: Russell B. Cummings
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