Charles "Chuck" Cunningham, 1936-2022
The happiest days were after the show ended.
Charles “Chuck” Cunningham, a basketball coach who played briefly in the NBA but was remembered more for his controversial role in the docuseries Happy Days, died Monday, February 21, 2022 in his home in Seabeck, Wash., following a brief battle with prostate cancer. He was 86.
Cunningham was born January 29, 1936 and raised in Milwaukee, Wisc., the son of Howard and Marion Cunningham. The Cunningham family became the subject of the docuseries just as Chuck was getting noticed as a standout forward for the University of Wisconsin Badgers. He appeared briefly in a few episodes, but disappeared from the show after a falling out with his father.
“This was probably the hardest time in my life, even though it was during the best time in my basketball career,” Chuck Cunningham revealed in a 1992 New York Times retrospective on the docuseries that riveted Americans during its earliest seasons. In later episodes Howard Cunningham would speak as if Chuck never existed, including during a series ending toast in which he said he and Marion were, “very proud of our two children,.” presumably Chuck’s brother Richard “Richie” Cunningham and sister Joanie, who was getting married in the series finale.
“It was a real wound at the time,” Chuck told the Times. “I kept watching the show. It was my only way of really knowing how the rest of the family was doing.”
Chuck was a standout basketball player at Jefferson High School in Milwaukee and earned a scholarship to play at Wisconsin. His career there earned him a tryout with Minneapolis Lakers. He made the team and stayed with them as they moved to Los Angeles, playing two years there. When his basketball career ended following a knee injury he became a high school teacher and coach at high schools in the Los Angeles suburbs of Glendale and West Covina, until he and his wife, Rachel, moved to the San Diego area, where he coached and taught and she taught at Vista High School for 15 years.
Chuck’s move to Los Angeles is what began the healing in the family, according to a few family members, though it took a few years and the end of the series to bear fruit. Chuck and Richard, a screenwriter living in Burbank, maintained contact, a secret they kept until the late 1960s, when their father said at a family gathering that he wished he could see Chuck again.
“It was something we couldn’t talk about with my dad,” Richard Cunningham told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “He was just so bitter and I wasn’t sure that would ever change. And then one day we’re watching the Lakers and my dad said it. It came out of nowhere.”
The roots of the rift came while Chuck was in college. He had earlier encouraged his parents to trust a local, Arthur Fonzarelli, to fix the family’s Santa display, but later questioned the parents’ growing relationship with Fonzarelli, who most often went by “Fonzi” or “The Fonz.”
“I probably sounded a lot more concerned than I was, but I might have been a little jealous, too. Fonzi was becoming the older brother in the family. I knew him as a decent fix-it guy, but his reputation otherwise scared me a little. I didn’t want to be replaced in the family at all, let alone, by a guy with Fonzi’s reputation,” Chuck said. “It was the series that made me feel better about it, because I saw how good he was to my parents, even if his social life and motorcycle stunts were a little questionable.”
Howard, for his part, said it was a therapist who was a regular customer at the hardware store that helped him understand his role in the dispute. “I might have been jealous and resentful of my son’s success,” he told the Milwaukee Press-Sentinel. “I had dreams when I was younger of making it big. I’m sitting at the table and my son is doing phenomenally well in college and seems likely to play basketball in the best league in the world. And I’m the owner of a hardware store. His question about Fonzi felt like this super successful guy, someone I had helped raise, was telling me I was wrong.”
“It hurt, and I blamed that hurt on Chuck,” Howard said. “He didn’t deserve that.”
That the docuseries never touched on the rift and went along with Howard’s direction that it be presented as if Chuck never existed is something everyone associated with the show later admitted was a mistake.
“I was about to get into a second docuseries (Laverne & Shirley) and was too focused on that to get into a squabble on a show that was already connecting so well with Americans,” said Garry Marshall, Happy Days’ creator. “It’s so obvious now, but the tone of the show was so light that at the time I figured we probably shouldn’t put any emphasis on the conflict that everyone had to have noticed.”
The healing happened quickly once the door opened. “Dad called me and basically the first words out of his mouth were, ‘I’m sorry.’ I told him I was sorry too and it wasn’t long after that he and Mom flew out to see me and my family,” Chuck said.
Chuck met his wife, Rachel, while coaching at Edgewood High School in West Covina. They raised three children: Elizabeth (Richard) Jones of Gig Harbor, Wash.; Spencer (Christine) Cunningham, of Keizer, Ore.; and Howard (Danielle) Cunningham of Carlsbad, Calif. When they retired from teaching they bought houses in Scottsdale, Ariz. and Seabeck, Wash.
Richard lives in Manhattan Beach, Calif. with his wife, Lori Beth. Joanie remains married to Chachi Arcola, a ceremony documented on the series finale. Joanie and Chachi were part of a spinoff docuseries and moved to Chicago where they owned a musical equipment store, later settling in Arlington Heights, Ill. Chuck was preceded in death by his father and mother.
“Over the years I’ve always regretted that Chuck’s place was diminished in the series, even forgotten,” Richard Cunningham said. “I can assure you, though, he was never forgotten by anyone in the family, and things ended pretty well in the end. The show might have been called Happy Days, and for the most part they were. They were happier, though, once Chuck was in the picture again.”