Many Hollywood actors promote causes—social justice, animal welfare and so forth—but Robert “Bob” Cummings was a popular film and television star who used his celebrity to endorse general aviation. Cummings played aviators in many of his productions and flew his own airplanes to shooting locations and while touring to promote his films. He was often photographed alongside his airplanes, all of which he named Spinach, although no one seems to know why.
Charles Clarence Robert Orville Cummings was born June 9, 1910, in Joplin, Missouri, and learned to fly while in high school,Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh but was forced to withdraw from school when his family’s finances were severely reduced by the stock market crash of 1929. He had become interested in acting while still at Carnegie and landed his first roles on Broadway and found work as a Hollywood extra during the early 1930s, sometimes working under different stage names. After signing a contract with Universal Pictures, he began to appear in better films, including and (both 1941) and and Alfred Hitchcock’s (both 1942).
