Cameron Cunningham

Cameron Cunningham's path to becoming a self-described "people's lawyer," one of some acclaim, took him through Texas oil fields, the Army, a Navajo Indian reservation and Northern California's New Age communities.

Later in life, Cunningham took to a hilltop near his Sebastopol home for inspiration. His paintings of birds, shamans and mandalas married the profane and sacred together in "humor and play," he wrote in his biography on www.camcunningham.com.

Cunningham, who had prostate cancer, died July 2 at his Sebastopol home. He was 73.

Cunningham was well known locally as an attorney who represented workers with harassment, discrimination and wage claims. The office he shared with other attorneys on Santa Rosa's Orchard Street was a familiar destination for people who believed they had been wronged by the system.

"I think he was born that way. He was a true rebel," said his wife, Sylvia Marie.

In 2000, Cunningham and Newman Strawbridge won a groundbreaking case against Purolator Air Filtration Products before the state Supreme Court after seven years of litigation.

The case, brought to obtain overtime owed to 216 minimum-wage production workers at Purolator's Santa Rosa plant, established for the first time at the Supreme Court level that one person can sue a company for four years of back wages owed to all employees rather than all employees having to file a class-action suit.

Cunningham was born Jan. 18, 1939, in Detroit. His father, who worked in the auto industry, moved the family to Lubbock, Texas, when Cunningham was still a boy and went to work in the oil fields.

Cunningham worked as a bit tipper in the fields during a summer break from Lubbock High School. But his claim to fame from those years was being a year behind Buddy Holly at the school.

Cunningham earned a degree in economics from Texas Tech University before he entered the Army and oversaw food production for two years at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. He later was accepted into law school at the University of Texas in Austin after he took the entrance exam on a lark and scored near the top, Marie said.

In his biography, Cunningham wrote he was "radicalized" in the Army and after law school he went through a period of "LSD, mushrooms and mescalito."

Cunningham worked on the Navajo Indian Reservation at Window Rock, Ariz., and then in Austin he helped form what may have been the nation's first law commune, in which all of the attorneys and staff earned the same pay.

Cunningham was among the attorneys who represented the Gainesville 8, a group of Vietnam War veterans who were charged with attempting to disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention.

In the late 1970s, Cunningham embarked on a "spiritual Grapes of Wrath" and moved to Palo Alto, where he and Marie met at a breath workshop that was canceled at the last minute and turned into a party. Both were divorced and had children from previous marriages.

The pair moved to Sebastopol in 1986 and Cunningham established his law practice in Santa Rosa.

In a poem, "Mandala for Next 20 Years," Cunningham described sitting beneath a redwood tree as "life unwinds, stresses recede."

"Conceive, weave life, love

"cloak with sages, blackberry

"vines, red oak leaves, cobwebs

"of time.

"Sun crawls, atoms disperse."

Besides his wife, Cunningham is survived by a daughter, Elizabeth Cunningham Bossart of Mill Valley; a son, Ian Cunningham of Seattle; and two brothers, Shell Cunningham of Plano, Texas, and Dan Cunningham of Austin, Texas.

The family plans a memorial service in September.

—Derek Moore