Joe Cummings starts his day the same every morning – at least Monday through Friday.
He walks out his door at 5:50 a.m. and into the large yellow school bus sitting in his Hancock driveway. He has an important job making sure the students in his town get to school on time. He starts with the high school and middle school students, heading for Peterborough, and then comes back to get the younger kids to Hancock Elementary, including one of his grandchildren.
By 8:30 a.m. he’s done with the morning pick-ups and drop-offs and has five hours before doing it all over at the end of the school day for another three hours. During the gap in his schedule, Cummings goes to the gym or skiing, and always takes his dog Maggie for a walk.
He never envisioned himself as a school bus driver, but after 10 years he can’t see doing anything else.
For much of his life, Cummings was destined to work in the newspaper industry. His family had owned the Peterborough Transcript since the turn of the 20th century, and even as a young kid he was involved.
“I started out as a paper boy. I had a paper route where I got paid $1.25 a week to deliver the newspapers,” Cummings said.
After graduating from Dublin School and going to Rochester Institute of Technology, where he majored in printing, it wasn’t assumed he was going to join the family business. But after “a short time as a ski bum” he joined his dad, Paul Jr., at the Transcript.
He first started off by running what was a thriving printing business and eventually took over as publisher of the newspaper when his father retired.
“We ran it together for quite a few years,” Cummings said. “And that really worked out well for the most part.”
But life in the newspaper industry was not easy. After 10 years as publisher, Cummings felt it was time to move on. So he sold the Transcript to the Monadnock Ledger in 2006, thus creating the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, and ending a longstanding history of the Cummings’s family involvement in the news of the Monadnock Region.
“My great-grandfather George Cummings sold the soapstone quarry in Francestown to buy the Transcript in 1900,” Cummings said. “But this was a good way for me to move on in life.”
Cummings didn’t really know what he was going to do once he finally decided to sell.
He took a few months off and then spent the next two-plus years as a conference facilitator for SDE. But that job required flying all over the country, and it got to be too much after a while.
“It’s not like I had this great plan of what I was going to do next,” Cummings said. “But it was clear to me [selling the paper] was the smart thing to do.”
So without a job and, more importantly, health insurance, Cummings was once again unsure of what would come next. Then one day, he was leaving the Peterborough Recycling Center and saw a sign saying the bus company was hiring.
“I walked in and asked ‘Do you offer health insurance?’ They said yes, so I said sign me up,” Cummings remembers.
He enjoys being around the kids and has gotten to know a lot of people in Hancock that he may not have otherwise. In fact, he’s had three of his four grandchildren on his buses over the years, two of them when he drove in Peterborough.
“It’s been an interesting career,” he said. “Never in a million years did I see it coming.”
Cummings also started an antique business with his wife Elaine four years ago. They’ve been married almost 47 years and have worked together for many of them. Elaine had been renting a space at a local consignment shop, but turns out they had the perfect spot at their home.
“It was kind of expensive, so I said why don’t we try starting an antique business in our barn,” Cummings said.
They went to the town of Hancock and got approval and soon had a business to get going.
“We had no business plan, no money, but we’ve always had a love of antiques,” he said.
They started by going to yard sales, but have since graduated to auctions a couple times a week and really focus on wood furniture. They have open hours Thursday through Sunday and also sell things on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace.
“We don’t make a lot of money at it, but it’s a fun business to be in,” he said.
The Cummings are learning as they go, but it’s something they enjoy – and can do together.
“We try to double our money and sometimes we don’t and other times we do much better,” Cummings said.
Cummings grew up in Peterborough and lived in three different houses on Sand Hill Road until moving to downtown Hancock about five years ago. He even bought the house he grew up in as an adult.
“We thought it would always be nice to live in a village, so we thought Hancock would be a great place to come,” Cummings said.
He remembers living in Peterborough as a youngster and picking up the phone and having to talk to an operator It didn’t require much to remember the family’s phone number in those days, considering it was just 5.
During the winters, he skied at Whit’s Tow, on the hill behind where Heritage Apartments are today, with three rope tows. He’s skied his whole life and passed the sport down to all his kids and now his grandkids do it.
There were just 3,000 people or so in Peterborough at the time and everyone knew each other. Nobody really left town because it had everything.
“Peterborough was a hub for all your needs,” he said.
Cummings said many moments stick out from his days in the newspaper world. There was the fire that destroyed the Transcript building on a Monday morning in 1975, but they still got that week’s paper out.
He got one-on-one interviews with countless presidential candidates, and even landed on “Good Morning America” a couple times to discuss political visits. When the planes flew into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, he found “a Peterborough kid who lived on the other side of the river,” to talk about what he witnessed.
“I always wanted to find the local angle on things,” Cummings said.
Cummings wasn’t trained as a newspaper man, but he didn’t let that stop him from putting out a weekly publication that he felt people in the area deserved.
“I really wasn’t a journalist, although I had to become one,” Cummings said. “Writing, talking with people, finding stories, that’s the real fun part of the business. And I really enjoyed being part of the community, bringing about issues going on in the community and having a voice in it.”