Trustees of
New Horizons at Choate

Born in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1937, Bill Cummings grew up in nearby Medford, where he attended public schools and, in 1958, graduated from Tufts University. Bill was thereafter employed in sales and marketing positions with Vick Chemical Company (Vaporub, etc.) of Greensboro, North Carolina, and Gortons of Gloucester, Inc., and he served in the U.S. Army Reserves. Subsequently, he acquired, built up, and sold a very old Medford, Massachusetts food products manufacturer, Wilmot H. Simonson Company.

Since 1970, Bill has been very successful in buying, building, and managing mostly commercial real estate in eastern Massachusetts. His firm has built or restored dozens of large or very large structures totaling 10 million square feet. Cummings Properties, LLC (CPL) currently provides business homes for more than 2,000 Massachusetts businesses and organizations. Apart from his role as founder of CPL, Bill is also the founder of Cummings Foundation, Inc. and New Horizons not-for-profit assisted and independent living communities in Woburn and Marlborough, MA, which currently provide homes for more than 500 seniors.

Bill's wife, Joyce, is a director of CPL and a trustee of Cummings Foundation, Inc. She is a former trustee of Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, where she once served as hospital dietician, and where she and Bill met. Joyce served two years as women's golf chair at Winchester Country Club, and is a past president of Winchester's EnKa Society, and a director of Winchester Community Music School and VNA Hospice Care, Inc. of Woburn. Bill and Joyce have four grown children.

Bill served 10 years as a charter trustee of Tufts University and is a former overseer of Tufts Medical School, director of Winchester Hospital, and founder and former publisher of three community newspapers-the Woburn Advocate, Stoneham Sun and Winchester Town Crier. He is still a trustee emeritus of Tufts University, and was chairman of Tufts' property-holding corporation (Walnut Hill Properties), as well as a bank director, and elected member and chairman of the Winchester Planning Board. He has worked as a licensed real estate broker, a licensed auctioneer, and even as a Massachusetts Justice of the Peace. Other outside activities include many philanthropic involvements, and several decades as a director and honorary director of Woburn Boys and Girls Club, Inc.

Bill was named 1998 Real Estate Entrepreneur of the Year for New England by Ernst & Young, LLP, and he was also awarded Tufts University's Distinguished Service Award "for service to Tufts, his community and his profession." His firm's restoration of the historic United Shoe Machinery Corp. complex in Beverly, Massachusetts was the subject of a very laudatory October 2, 1997 feature story in The Wall Street Journal by Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable.

Bill was awarded an honorary Doctor of Public Service degree by Tufts University in May 2006, and was named one of the 50 most influential Bostonians by the Boston Business Journal in 2011. He is a golfer and a former director of Winchester Country Club, is an avid ocean sailor, and a licensed Scuba diver. In May 2011, he and Joyce joined a national philanthropic organization known as "The Giving Pledge." Later that year, they were named runners-up in the Boston Globe's annual Bostonian of the Year selection.