The two personas—the salesman and the defiant pain in the neck—seemed to come from the same place. I asked Thomas what his special technique for sales was as a kid. He said he didn’t have any. It was simply that “I was willing to be rejected. That’s what allows you to be a good salesperson. You have to be willing to be rejected.” It was a trait that let him persist until he got what he wanted and avoid whatever he didn’t want.
For a long time, though, he didn’t know what he wanted. He had grown up in the next county over from New Berlin, in a valley outside the town of Nichols. His father had been a factory worker, his mother a telephone operator. Neither had gone to college, and no one expected Bill Thomas to go either. As he came to the end of high school, he was on track to join a union training program. But a chance conversation with a friend’s older brother who was visiting home from college and told him about the beer, the girls, and the good times made him rethink.
He enrolled in a nearby state college, SUNY Cortland. There, something ignited him. Perhaps it was the high school teacher who predicted as he left that he’d be back in town pumping gas before Christmas. Whatever it was, he succeeded far beyond anyone’s expectation, chewing through the curriculum, holding on to a 4.0 grade point average, and becoming student body president again. He had gone in thinking he might become a gym teacher, but in biology class he began thinking that maybe medicine was for him. He ended up becoming Cortland’s first student to get into Harvard Medical School.
He loved Harvard. He could have gone there with a chip on his shoulder—the working-class kid out to prove he was nothing like those snobs, with their Ivy League educations and trust fund accounts. But he didn’t. He found the place to be a revelation. He loved being with people who were so driven and passionate about science, medicine, everything.
“One of my favorite parts of medical school was that a group of us had dinner at the Beth Israel Hospital cafeteria every night,” he told me. “And it would be two and a half hours of arguing cases—intense and really great.”
He also loved being in a place where people believed he was capable of momentous things. Nobel Prize winners came to teach classes, even on Saturday mornings, because they expected him and the others to aspire to greatness.
He never felt the need to win anyone’s approval, however. Faculty tried to recruit him to their specialized training programs at big-name hospitals or to their research laboratories. Instead, he chose family medicine residency in Rochester, New York. It wasn’t exactly Harvard’s idea of aspiring to greatness.
Returning home to upstate New York had been his goal all along. “I’m a local guy,” he told me. In fact, his four years at Harvard were the only time he ever lived outside upstate New York. During vacations, he used to bicycle from Boston to Nichols and back—a 330-mile ride in each direction. He liked the self-sufficiency—pitching his tent in random orchards and fields along the road and finding food wherever he could. Family medicine was attractive in the same way. He could be independent, go it alone.
Partway through residency, when he’d saved up some money, he bought some farmland near New Berlin that he’d often passed on his bike rides and imagined owning some day. By the time he finished his training, working the land had become his real love. He entered local practice but soon focused on emergency medicine because it offered predictable hours, on a shift, letting him devote the rest of his time to his farm. He was committed to the idea of homesteading—being totally self-reliant. He built his home by hand with friends. He grew most of his own food. He used wind and solar power to generate electricity. He was completely off the grid. He lived by the weather and the seasons. Eventually, he and Jude, a nurse who became his wife, expanded the farm to more than four hundred acres. They had cattle, draft horses, chickens, a root cellar, a sawmill, and a sugarhouse, not to mention five children.
“I really felt that the life I was living was the most authentically true life I could live,” Thomas explained.
He was at that point more farmer than doctor. He had a Paul Bunyan beard and was more apt to wear overalls beneath his white coat than a tie. But the emergency room hours were draining. “Basically, I got sick of working all those nights,” he said. So he took the job in the nursing home. It was a day job. The hours were predictable. How hard could it be?
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