How a pecan tree led to a boy's lifelong nickname - Cardinal News

Nov 13, 2024

Jackie Dee Cunningham spent a lot of his time as a child waiting under a pecan tree, willing its fruit to fall into his hands, anxiously waiting on the ground.

Growing up in an orphanage, extra commodities were rare. The Virginia Baptist Children’s Home, now called HopeTree Family Services, was self-sustaining. The children tended to the farm — waking at 4 a.m. to milk the cows, tending to the garden and working in the fields throughout the day, and being rewarded for their work in the dining hall at dinner time with “wholesome” meals that they’d grown themselves.

For Cunningham, it was important to find joy in the little things. The pecan tree that stood outside Carpenter Cottage, where Cunningham stayed, meant more to him than shade on a hot summer day.

He didn’t know what a pecan was, nor that it was edible, until a friend told him you could actually eat the strange, hard masses falling from the tree.

“My first bite was divine,” he said. “I just fell completely in love with pecans.”

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He mastered a technique to carefully shell them, taking care to not split the nut inside the shell while peeling away the outside layer. He began collecting pecans, shelling them, and hiding them under his bed in boxes.

Other kids would try to steal them, so he began hiding them in jars outside in bushes.

When other kids saw him hiding pecans, they felt they had no choice but to call him “Squirrel.” Another alumnus from the home, Ollie Pickral, still refers to Cunningham as “Squirrel” today — even though the two men are now in their 70s.

The kids at Virginia Baptist didn’t have a lot of money. Cunningham said they were given one pair of trousers per year. They received an allowance of 35 cents per week — which he said wasn’t nothing for a kid back in the early 1960s.

“You could buy a fair amount of candy, go to a movie, and have a good time with that 35 cents,” he said. But pecans were free, and plentiful.

The pecans didn’t just act as treats for Cunningham. He said he would supplement meals with the nuts — with the amount that he was working in the field as a growing child, he said he always had an appetite.

He would unshell entire jars of nuts and bring them to friends’ homes as gifts when he was invited over for a meal, or to the house of a girl that he liked.

“It was my way of showing appreciation to people who were good to me,” he said.

Much like some regions of Southwest Virginia, that pecan tree was recently torn down by the remnants of Hurricane Helene.

When Cunningham saw the news of the tree’s fate on the HopeTree website, he “immediately called” and asked for a piece of the wood.

Cunningham is a relatively well-known character around HopeTree’s grounds. He stays active in the Virginia Baptist alumni community, and is eager to tell stories of the home’s past whenever given the opportunity.

Knowing this, HopeTree gifted him a few slabs of wood from the tree they knew he enjoyed for so many years as a child.

“I’m a very possessive person,” Cunningham said. “I think that stems from the fact that I didn’t have anything growing up. … I became obsessed with those pecans, they were very personal to me.”

He said other alumni from the home were given pieces of the tree to take home, too, but in his opinion, nobody else cherished this tree like he did.

“Their stories, and I’ll be humble when I say this,” he said, “I have not met a story that matched mine.”

Cunningham has turned those slabs from the tree he cherished so dearly into collages, pasting onto them memorabilia from his time in the military and at home. He will put them on display in his home, alongside pieces of art depicting the HopeTree campus that his wife, Judy, painted for him.

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Sam graduated from Penn State with degrees in journalism and Spanish. She was an investigative reporter... More by Samantha Verrelli