George T. Cummings, Jr.

George T. Cummings Jr. often introduced himself as George T. Cummings Jr. III Esq. He’d never taken the bar exam, but George was a different kind of “esquire” — a shield bearer, a man on the road to knighthood. For 74 years of this one wild and precious life, George was well on his way.

He hit the scene in 1951, born into a folded, ridge-and-valley extension of the central Appalachian Mountains. He arrived first in the family, followed by a brood of little sisters who ruled the roost before too long. He was the odd man out in the most literal sense of the phrase, but George looked after the five girls for as long as he stuck around. It’s the esquire way.

George turned 16 in ‘67, right when they started calling it the Summer of Love and singing about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. You could say he came of age with the 1960s — or that the 1960s came of age as soon as he did. Historians continue to debate this point, but everyone agrees that George was the original hippie.

He never joined the military or got drafted to Vietnam, but strangers would often thank him for his service. George had the look of a man who’d seen a thing or two because he had. His eyes changed color depending on his mood. As a young man, after finishing his tour of duty in Scranton, PA, George bought himself a bus ticket and took to the open road, trucking his way out of the Appalachians and westward into the Rockies, where he finally found enough mountains to tuck in and make himself at home.

He spent the better part of his life among those mountains, even when he didn’t have a place to hang his hat (usually a Tibetan smoking cap). George got his education in the streets of Boulder, the Berkeley of the Rockies as they call it. He painted. He partied. Somehow he learned the Hindi language. He loved Colorado enough to carry his father’s ashes there, scattering them near a valley at the Tennessee Pass.

Life was often scattered, patched together in oddly shaped fragments. George’s mind was ordered that way. He could be an old man one minute and a child the next. His love came through in little jokes and meandering monologues, rarely smooth or consistent, but colorful and sincere, like the abstract swirls he painted with his fingers and sold to mountaineering tourists. George could disappear for years at a time. He hardly knew his two children. Even when George loved you dearly, he may have seen you far more often in his mind than in person. To George, those two kinds of seeing were almost one and the same.

In his later years, George drifted back to the Appalachians, retiring to a small apartment in Taylor, PA. His sisters took turns delivering him a daily six-pack. The beer was nonalcoholic, but George didn’t know that, so he’d still get a nice buzz going. He was creative that way.

On Monday, September 28, 2026, George completed his journey to knighthood. He finished his sixth beer of the day, cracked a joke, and tucked in for a nice, long nap. That’ll be Sir George T. Cummings Jr. to you from now on, thank you very much. After that, all five of his little sisters — Ellen Masters, Donna Robino, Pam Ceneskie, Judi Anderson, and Maureen Hunter — hopped a plane to Colorado, where they would scatter George’s ashes at the Tennessee Pass, facing a valley to the west.

Arrangements were entrusted to Lawrence E. Young Funeral Home and Cremation Services Inc.