Dental Work

Bill McGurk’s very first job was like pulling teeth.

“It took me four teeth to make my first dollar,” said McGurk, the president and CEO of Rockville Bank.

After he ran out of merchandise to sell to the tooth fairy and grew a few inches, McGurk switched to delivering Berkshire Eagle newspapers in his hometown of Pittsfield, Mass., and mowing lawns with a neighborhood friend.

In his mid-teens, McGurk got his lifeguarding certificate and also became a summer camp counselor at a Catholic youth camp.

By his late teens, McGurk was hired as a drugstore clerk, where he learned his first lesson about the business world: discretion.

“You don’t discuss personal stuff in business,” he said. For example, one shouldn’t yell across the store that he’s selling laxatives to a person. Some things are purchased discreetly for a reason.

He entered the banking world during the summer of his sophomore year in college at Holy Cross. As a teller at City Savings Bank for two summers, McGurk gained an appreciation for the value of saving money.

“I learned to not spend my entire paycheck all at once,” he said.

After graduating from Holy Cross with a degree in economics in 1963 and having completed the school’s ROTC program, McGurk joined the Navy as a midshipman.

Although he was accepted into the graduate program at Columbia in 1965, he did not have enough money to enroll himself at the school with two sisters and a brother at home.

McGurk was able to afford the business administrative graduate program at UMass after City Savings Bank offered to pay half the tuition to keep him working with the bank.

By 1975, McGurk rose to the position of vice president of consumer loans at City Savings Bank. That’s also the year he moved to Clinton Savings Bank.

McGurk said he’s learned that as a banker, “I can give back to my community and help people out with their individual problems.”

In 1980, he left Clinton Savings Bank to join up with Rockville Bank.

That was the year Rockville Bank Chairman Frank Gregory said to the former Navy man, “Don’t rock the boat.”

McGurk, now in his 28th year at Rockville Bank, seems to have succeeded. He joins the bank in celebrating its 150th anniversary.