Thursday, October 1, 2026
Eighty-two-year-old Erich August Kuhnel was awarded an honorary East Rockaway High School diploma on May 26 at the district’s Board of Education meeting.
Kuhnel, who enlisted in the Air Force In September 1951 when he was still a few credits shy of graduating high school, served as a radio operator during the last two years of the Korean Conflict. In September 1955 he completed his service and received an honorable discharge. While in the service he earned a GED — but he always regretted not receiving his diploma from East Rockaway High School.
He married a 1955 ERHS graduate, and after a few years living in Levittown, they moved back to the town they both loved. By now they had four children, and they wanted them to have the small town experience they had had growing up in East Rockaway. Kuhnel moved when his company relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1979, but a part of his heart always stayed in East Rockaway.
His daughter, Judi Fuller, said that he still asks her for ERHS spirit wear for his birthday and Father's Day gifts. “Not only did he and my mom go to the high school, but all four of his children attended, two of whom graduated from there,” Fuller said. (The two youngest moved with their parents to Oklahoma prior to their graduations.) Four of his grandchildren have now graduated from East Rockaway.
Although Kuhnel had been upfront with his children that he had not attended college — in order to encourage them to attend since he was passed over for promotions due to his lack of a college degree — it was only two years ago that he told them he hadn't graduated high school, expressing profound regret that he had never gotten his East Rockaway diploma.
