Tom Thurston Email and Phone Number

Retired

Residential & commercial real estate sales in a community transitioning from being a longtime Portuguese fishing community to a town of gay and lesbian second home owners.

Grew company to become the largest Authorized Sales Agent for the Baby Bells following their divestiture from AT&T. Identified market for small business 800 service when initially available and sold it to the existing customers of all the Regional Bell Operating Companies except Bell South, plus GTE. Later successfully transitioned to sales of small business (2-9 line) Centrex-based services.

Began as a Growth Forecaster, then Business Office and Repair Service Supervisor, then PBX/key system salesperson (NorTel & Toshiba), then Executone of Boston Sales Manager with 12 PBX/key system/network services salespeople. Was recruited from there to join USTeleCenters, a Boston telecom start-up, initially a franchise and later the owner of the name.

Worked for this one-exchange local phone company that still used crank phones connected to a manually-operated village switchboard located in the living room of the married couple who bought the company in 1951. By the mid 70’s this was the last magneto telephone exchange in the US. It finally converted to dial in October 1983 following an effort by local citizens to keep their hand-crank phones and unique ringdown phone numbers.