Paying it Forward for Future Bentley Basketball Players
For Bill Burke ’68, Bentley was the starting point for what matters most in his life: a rewarding career, enduring friendships that began on the basketball court and a happy marriage that is still going strong after 56 years.
That lifelong connection is what inspired Burke and his wife, Maura, to include a gift to the men’s basketball program in their estate plans. “Outside of family, Bentley is where we chose to give,” Burke says. “I owe so much to the university and the basketball program.”
Burke grew up in Waltham and Natick in a family that emphasized hard work and helping each other. Burke worked part-time jobs throughout high school and when it came time to apply to college, he set his sights on Bentley because he wanted a solid business education. “When I was accepted, I was overjoyed,” Burke recalls.
Burke commuted in a 1962 Ford Falcon to Bentley’s campus, then located in downtown Boston, where he benefited from the rigorous academics for which the university is known. He recalls the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965, a power outage that plunged nearly 30 million people into darkness on the evening of November 9 that year.
“We were scheduled to have a test in one of my classes the next day, and we thought it would be cancelled because of the blackout,” Burke remembers. “But the teacher said that if we knew the material, one night of darkness wasn’t going to make a difference. And we had the test.”
Building a Career on a Bentley Foundation
Burke attended an ROTC program offered by Bentley in conjunction with Boston University. He was commissioned as a U.S. Army Signal Corps officer and served for two years in the Army, including one year in Vietnam.
He worked as a union laborer in the summer months while attending Bentley and in 1967, he was assigned work at a construction site in Waltham that turned out to be the new Bentley campus. “My job was to provide bricks and mortar to the bricklayers — so one might say I helped build Bentley, brick by brick!”
The discipline that he learned at Bentley helped Burke land his first job as a supervisor of financial planning at Honeywell Information Systems, earn his MBA at Suffolk University and go on to a series of CFO roles in the technology and communications sectors. In 2001, he founded Westbury Strategic Associates, which provides financial consulting services to entrepreneurial companies.
Lessons Learned on and off the Court
His Bentley education is all the more meaningful to him because he had to work throughout his undergraduate years to cover expenses. Basketball Coach Al Shields, Bentley’s first athletic director who coached basketball from 1963 to 1978, helped Burke with work-study jobs such as washing team practice uniforms.
“Playing sports in college could be challenging at times because I was balancing it with academics, a social life, family time and a job,” Burke says. “But the rewards of that hard work were worth the time and effort.”
Burke says he was lucky to be on the team in the first place. During tryouts as a “walk-on” in 1964, he was picked last, but that didn’t deter him. To motivate himself, Burke selected number 14 for his team jersey, in honor of legendary Boston Celtics player Bob Cousy. He played throughout his undergraduate career and through that experience learned resilience. It was also through basketball that he developed friendships that are thriving after more than 60 years. “To this day, we’re still friends,” he notes. “We get together every year to shoot the breeze and reminisce.”
A Lasting Bentley Connection
One of his Bentley friends changed the course of Burke’s life when he asked Burke to join him on a double date. Burke was happy to do a favor for his friend and will never forget the moment he met his wife, Maura. “We just hit it off,” Burke shares.
“If not for Bentley, I wouldn’t have met my wife of 56 years and I wouldn’t have had the career I had,” Burke says. “I loved my time at Bentley — it was just such a great place to be.”