By Nick Buglione
It's not that the 54-year-old is starving or homeless, like so many of the millions across the globe who receive the organization's charity. Cornell is a volunteer, a red kettle bell-ringer to be precise, and he's one of the Salvation Army's best.
Five years ago, the lifelong East Meadow resident was grappling with alcohol and gambling addictions and still fighting the demons of clinical depression, an affliction that had plagued him since childhood, when he decided to join the Salvation Army's ranks.
Five years later, he's become an invaluable local breadwinner for the non-profit organization, bringing in some $5,000 in donations annually. Last October he was given the Salvation Army's Red Kettle Bell Ringer Award for collecting the most cash in Nassau County last holiday season.
"David is one of the best volunteers," said Luxene Claircius, who once ran the Salvation Army office in Westbury and supervised Cornell. "He's very honest and is serious about his work. You can trust David with a million dollars."
Cornell is in his glory outside the Waldbaum's on Front Street from the middle of November to Christmas Eve, where he has been a fixture since 1999. While most Salvation Army bell-ringers are content with doing just that, Cornell pulls out all the stops. He plays the guitar and harmonica and even does magic tricks -- anything to get people to drop a little something into the kettle.
"I'm not your standard Salvationist," Cornell said with a smile. "I don't do a lot of the Methodist and Presbyterian hymns, because I believe that it's important in fund-raising in front of the kettle to sing songs that have nice melodies."
The Salvation Army has truly been Cornell's salvation. Before he joined the organization, his life was rough, to say the least. Born the son of a military nurse, Cornell grew up in Mitchel Manor and still lives there today. On the wall of his apartment hangs an old picture of a 7- or 8-year-old boy standing in front of an edifice, presumably his home, hugging a cat.
That boy was Cornell. The edifice, though, was a hospital.
"I look like a happy kid, don't I?" Cornell said pensively, taking the picture down from the wall and studying it. "Childhood illness meant that I spend the majority of my adolescent years hospitalized."
Diagnosed with clinical depression at age 6, Cornell's childhood was marked with great sadness and isolation, as he moved from hospital to hospital. The only education he got was private tutoring, and he had few friends. "Hospitals were not nice places to grow up," Cornell said. "The people that worked in the hospitals were not fond of children. The children were mistreated, they were overdosed, and some of them were misdiagnosed. It's basically been my cross in life."
Withdrawing into himself, Cornell became a voracious reader. He found comfort in the works of Tolstoy, Dickinson and other writers who became the youngster's only companions.
When he was 11, he sent some of his own writing to a number of publications, and his first poem was published in a Fordham University literary magazine. By the time he was 15, Cornell had read the translations of every major Russian poet, as well as the entire Great Books of the Western World series.
"It was the only thing that I really had," he said. "It was a great source of solace for me in the hospital. I could read, read, read, and people always sent me books."
In the written word, Cornell found his calling, and even though he never went to school or attended college, he would go on to become a journalist in his adult years for the now-defunct Long Island Lifestyles. Several of his poems have been published in The New York Times.
Life as a grownup, however, wasn't much easier than life as a child. Cornell was hit hard by the deaths of his father, in 1979, and his mother, in 1991, and took to drinking and gambling as a way of numbing the pain. He remembers that the holidays, a time he now looks forward to, were particularly rough.
"I was basically wasting myself on the holidays, drinking and gambling," he said. "When you don't have parents, especially at Thanksgiving, it's the hardest time of the year. It's hard to articulate in words. It's a deep pain in the gut. It really hurts."
Then, one year during the holidays, he saw a Salvation Army volunteer ringing a bell and collecting money in front of a store, and it changed his life. "I thought that maybe I would like to do that," he said, figuring it certainly would be a more productive way to spend the holidays. "I play the harmonica, and sometimes I would play it while I was walking down the street and people would walk up and give me money."
He joined the Salvation Army and became a model volunteer. Though the organization's holiday red kettle campaign starts in mid-November, an eager Cornell is usually out in front of the Waldbaum's before then. And when the drive is in full swing, he's been known to log hours in front of the East Meadow store, once working 12 hours a day for 25 straight days.
"It's what he lives for, practically," said Chris Gonzalez, 20. "He's out there all the time just trying to get as much money as possible."
Gonzalez, formerly of East Meadow, ran into Cornell at the Waldbaum's a few years ago. After striking up a conversation, Gonzalez was compelled to join the Salvation Army, too, and he remains a volunteer to this day.
"I believe when I'm out there, everything I do, I hope it incites young people to volunteer," Cornell said. He even recently introduced a program called "Chimes of Freedom," which involves recruiting troubled youths as volunteers.
If it weren't for the Salvation Army, Cornell knows exactly where he'd be right now. "I think I would be totally lost," he said. "I think, pardon my terseness, I'd be drinking and gambling."
By the time this holiday season ends, Cornell estimates that he will have collected some $20,000 for the Salvation Army over his tenure, but he's sure he's gotten far more in return. "It's made me happy," he said. And that's something he hasn't felt often.
