Around the Island

Christina Cunningham: "Amazing place for heart”

CAROL GALLIGAN PHOTO | Christina Cunningham, outside her Heights home. That’s the Yacht Club over her shoulder and she and Joe love the view. “You can see the water but it doesn’t come pouring into the basement!”

Christina Cunningham began life as Christina Kalashnikov (yes, as in the rifle) and during college, when she was a black turtlenecked anti-war activist, there was something of a murmur at rallies whenever she was summoned on the loud speaker. She married in 1962, and never for a single moment contemplated a hyphenated name. Trading in Kalashnikov for Cunningham was, she felt, a no-brainer.

As her name suggests, she was raised in a Russian Orthodox family, moving frequently from Brooklyn to Westchester to Long Island, as her father, a state employee, moved with his job. “Periodically, we followed the Russian Orthodox rules, some of which I believe my mother made up.”

Her grandfather, who fought on the White Russian or Czarist side in the Russian Civil War, was captured and subsequently escaped, finally making his way to the United States through Canada. Eventually he was able to send for Christina’s grandmother and her mother, who was then 10 or 11. For many years, Christina said, “The family was convinced that they would be deported. They were always worried they were going to be sent back to Russia and executed.”

Her father died when she was 12 and her mother’s subsequent remarriage and later divorce landed her in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she graduated from high school and went on to nearby Stetson College. Joe Cunningham, recently discharged from the Navy, turned up there as well. “He was very exotic,” she remembered, “because he was from New York and two years older, really very exotic, and he came from such a normal family, it was wonderful. I just fell in love with his family, Helen and Tate. They were marvelous people.” Helen and Tate would eventually have a summer home on Shelter Island.

After Christina’s college graduation, the couple moved to New York City, where Joe went to work as a financial analyst and Christina attended graduate school at New York University. But she didn’t like it very much, being used to smaller classes. She dropped out and trained to become a computer programmer, going on to a career as a systems analyst. She began at Brooklyn Union Gas, living in Brooklyn Heights, moving then to Mount Kisco, where Joe commuted to the city and she worked for several firms in White Plains. In 1966, they built a home in Pound Ridge, dearly loved — “It was a beautiful property, high on a hill, and you could see a million miles. It was a wonderful place to be.”

She took some years off while raising their two children, Natasha and Tom, born in 1969 and 1972, and did consulting work from home. “I was ‘earth mother’ there, with a huge garden. It was a very nice situation for a long time. But then in the late ‘70s came a bad time in the stock market. Joe decided to become a building contractor and moved out of New York City. We had to have something regular.” Christina gladly went back to work, putting in 15 years at Readers Digest, then a final 18 months at Matthew Benders, a legal publishing firm.

In 1997, with the children grown, an unforeseen opportunity occurred when they were offered a large sum of money for their Pound Ridge home. They accepted, reluctantly, and began a search for a new home. They spent a year looking, finally narrowing the choices to three houses in Maine. On the way there, they came to visit Helen — Tate had passed away by this point — and she suggested they look here on the Island.

“This house was available and at a very good price. And here we are. In 1998, the cats and I drove out together. The lilacs were blooming in Pound Ridge and I literally started crying as I left the driveway and cried all the way to the ferry. But the lilacs were also blooming on Shelter Island. It was a beautiful day and we have not cried about it since, nor would we go back if we could.”

Before long she had things to do and people to see, and even the cats were happy. Now, like most Islanders whenever they have been away for a little while, “We are taken by a lovely homecoming feeling when we get on that ferry.  Life is good.”

There has, though, been one major setback. Several years ago, after months of painful and debilitating but seemingly unrelated symptoms, Christina was finally diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of polymyocitis, an idiopathic inflammatory myopathy that causes profound muscle weakness. By the time she was admitted to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where she stayed for three months, “I could hardly move, it was pretty awful.” Indeed, there was some question whether she would survive.

Like other autoimmune diseases, there is no cure, but there is an upside. “You just don’t realize until it happens how many friends there really are. I think I got a letter from everybody that lives on Shelter Island and people came to visit. I was overwhelmed with flowers, my room was totally full of flowers.”

People fed Joe while Christina was in the hospital and continued to feed both of them after she came home. “People would come weekly and bring food, it was just wonderful.  I cry when I think about it, it was just an overwhelming thing, something you don’t expect, don’t feel you deserve and you don’t know why, but there you are. Maybe other small towns are the same, but this is the one I know and it’s just an amazing place for heart, a great deal of heart.”

But she doesn’t think of herself as “a sick person,” and in fact she’s quite busy — a trustee of Union Chapel, a past president of the Garden Club, active in the Historical Society and in the Bridge Street  Volunteer Park renovation, and hopes to be “sailing again soon.”

If anything, she’s “a party person,” loves entertaining and was especially pleased when she and Joe celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a celebration in the Havens House barn, hosted by her children.