Thomas Walsh built his moving business the old-fashioned way: by focusing on one customer at a time. His wife, Laura Freeman Walsh, recalls how he inspired trust and loyalty.

	Laura Walsh and her son Bill (CGS'85, SMG'87)

“His real talent was in developing relationships with people,” she says. “He wasn’t just a vendor; he became a friend. Almost all the time he would be right there on the job, and if he wasn’t pushing a cart he would be there supervising the whole move, making sure things went the way he had laid them out. It was a personal commitment for him to see the job through.”

Thomas Walsh also was committed to supporting higher education, though he never earned a college degree. Before his untimely death in 1993, he was a Boston University trustee and parent of two alumni, Thomas (COM’91) and William (CGS’85, SMG’87), who is husband of Heidi (SAR’86). Thanks to a $100,000 family donation, BU will dedicate a welcome desk in his memory in the Student Village fitness and recreation center.

The late Thomas Walsh. Photo credit: Bachrach

Cecil Walsh established C. Walsh Movers in 1924; later his sons, Thomas and Fred, joined the firm. The company began to handle interstate moves and grew rapidly through the 1960s and 1970s. Thomas realized that the growth potential of commercial moving outweighed the residential side of the business, and under his leadership, Walsh Movers became the largest commercial relocation company in Boston. Today clients include Fidelity Investments, Boston University, Boston Medical Center, Mellon Financial, and TJX Companies. It also provides relocation services to most of the larger legal, insurance, and accounting firms in Boston.

Bill Walsh, who this year received SMG’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Service to Alma Mater, is president of the family business. Laura Walsh is president of Recordkeeper Archives Management Systems, Ltd., in Avon, Massachusetts, and her son Tom is the vice president. Recordkeeper, which Tom Sr. spun off as a separate venture in 1976, is the largest independent records storage and management company in New England.

The donation to the Student Village is not the Walshes’ first large contribution to BU. In 1994 the family honored Thomas’s memory with a naming gift for a School of Management classroom.

“Boston University is very important to us and was very important to my husband,” says Laura Walsh, who was named a trustee in 1993. “We all feel, as he did, that we want to share so that others can have opportunities.”

— Hope Green