Bill Cummings
Author | Winchester, MA/USA |
Website
My autobiography is not a Horatio Alger story, or maybe it
is a little bit. Born during the Great Depression, I grew up
poor but first tried my hand at being an entrepreneur when
I was six or seven years old. I sold bottles of soda pop each
afternoon at a neighborhood construction site, and there are
still so many simila.... more
My autobiography is not a Horatio Alger story, or maybe it
is a little bit. Born during the Great Depression, I grew up
poor but first tried my hand at being an entrepreneur when
I was six or seven years old. I sold bottles of soda pop each
afternoon at a neighborhood construction site, and there are
still so many similar opportunities for kids today.
A decade later, I talked my way into college, though perhaps I
did not really belong there. I was able to pay all of my tuition
and expenses by always working and by being forever frugal.
Soon after graduation, I made a point of paying back a single
$50 scholarship award by making a $50 contribution to my
alma mater, and I have continued giving to the university—
and many other recipients—ever since.
I became a serial entrepreneur in earnest, and
then a philanthropist, after first working all over
the country with two national consumer-products
firms. In 1964, I spent $4,000 to purchase my first
real business, a hundred-year-old manufacturer
of fruit-juice-beverage bases, which I quickly
expanded by providing refrigerated dispensers and
drinks to several hundred colleges and universities.
With the million-dollar proceeds from the sale
of that business in 1970, I founded a suburban-
Boston commercial real estate firm. Cummings
Properties quickly grew from one small building
to a portfolio of more than 100 modern
buildings today. Along the way, we accumulated
uncommon wealth, much of which my wife,
Joyce, and I have been actively disbursing
through Cummings Foundation, which we
established together in 1986.
Joyce and I were the first Massachusetts couple
to join the Giving Pledge, an international
philanthropic organization founded by Bill and
Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet. We have been
honored to receive dozens of community honors
and accolades, including those from Ernst &
Young, the Irish International Immigrant Center,
the Archdiocese of Boston, and NAIOP, the association for
the commercial real estate development industry. We have
both received several honorary doctoral degrees and have
three times served as college commencement speakers. In
2012, the Boston Globe named Joyce and me runners-up
as Greater Bostonians of the Year.
We also received a Friend of Israel award, and Boston
Business Journal named me the Real Estate Visionary of the
Year in 2014. More recently, in 2017, the Greater Boston
Chamber of Commerce named Joyce and me to its Academy
of Distinguished Bostonians. We have lived together in
Winchester, Massachusetts, for fifty years.