“Let’s meet at Resky” is a common, nearly unavoidable, line at the College. The Paresky Center — with its dining options, seating, and office space — is a focal point on campus. While we are all well-acquainted with the experience of walking through its doors, most of us are less familiar with the person behind the bustling building’s name. 

David Paresky ’60 was born in 1938 and grew up in Lawrence, Mass., which he described as a small mill town on the Merrimack River. “I was just not a wealthy kid,” he said in an interview with the Record. “We were a relatively poor family, but we survived.” 

College initially wasn’t on Paresky’s radar, but his mother wanted him to get a good education. She submitted an application to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., a college-preparatory school, on his behalf. “She decided it would be a wonderful opportunity for me if I was accepted,” he said. He attended Phillips Academy on a scholarship and worked for the school’s audiovisual department during his time there. “I threaded film for the 16-millimeter projector for anyone wanting to run a movie,” Paresky said. 

One night, the school showed a movie for a spring vacation trip to Bermuda. “I looked at the white houses and pink sand beaches and said, ‘Wow, it looks amazing,’ but I could never afford it,” he said. A senior at the event told Paresky that, if he could recruit 15 students to go on the trip, he would be able to go for free. While Paresky did manage to find 15 students and organize the trip, he was ultimately unable to go due to the death of his father. Despite not going, this experience sparked Paresky’s lifelong interest in travel.

While deciding where to go after high school, Paresky had a difficult choice to make: He’d been offered a full scholarship to Yale, but, following his father’s death, wanted to stay closer to his family, who were then living in Bennington, Vt. 

“Williams originally didn’t match the offer,” he said. “But someone from [Phillips Academy] Andover who was a Williams alum made a call and said ‘Don’t miss out on this guy — match this offer,’ and they did, [so] I got a full scholarship to Williams.” Ultimately, he enrolled at the College in the fall of 1956.

Long before Paresky moved into his first-year dorm in Sage Hall, his family had a history with the College. “My grandfather was an immigrant from Europe, and for some reason ended up in Williamstown,” he said. “He was a peddler, and the story’s told that he went by [the College’s] dorms with a pushcart and some of the kids thought it was great fun to pour water on him from the second floor windows as he made his rounds. He was determined, and the next day he came back wearing a rain poncho.”

“The kids finally decided they liked him, and he became kind of a fixture,” Paresky added. “He was a very likeable guy.”

As a student at the College, Paresky didn’t participate much in the College’s social scene due to his on-campus job obligations. “The problem was that I was a poor kid who was working a lot the whole time I was at Williams,” he said. 

One of Paresky’s weekend jobs was operating the College’s telephone system in the basement of Hopkins Hall. “It was an old switchboard that had wires that you plugged into a hole on one side and the other side was the person you were talking to,” he said. 

Despite his busy schedule, Paresky still managed to participate in athletics and a cappella at the College. “I did play football freshman and sophomore year, and I also … started a singing group … similar to the octet groups at other colleges,” he said. “It was called the Overweight Eight, because there were nine of us.” 

His group even made a record with RCA Victor, a New York record label. “It was an LP,” he said. “[There were] 23 songs on it, and it was exciting to be down at RCA studios in New York.”

In addition to his musical pursuits, Paresky excelled in the classroom, graduating cum laude as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. “I majored in economics, and in fact I was an economics teaching assistant my senior year,” he said. 

While he enjoyed the classes he took at the College, Paresky voiced one major regret: “I should have tried to take a class with a professor named [Robert] Gaudino,” he said. “He was a great teacher, I kept hearing about him.” In addition to learning from different professors, Paresky added that he wished he had expanded his course load to include other disciplines like philosophy. 

Paresky also developed his entrepreneurial skills while at the College. “I created a Williams notebook, because back then everybody had to have notebooks for every class,” he said. “I thought it was very expensive to buy five notebooks every semester.” 

The notebook had a purple cow on the cover, and was more affordable than other notebooks that students were buying. “I went to [my friend Jim Briggs’ ’60] room and said, ‘I have a great offer for notebooks,’ and he said ‘Oh, that sounds good, I’ll take five,’ and I said ‘Wait a minute, you have three semesters [left],’ so he said ‘I’ll take 15,’” Paresky said. He added that the exchange continued until he convinced Briggs to purchase forty-five.

After graduating from the College, Paresky recieved degrees from both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. “While I was doing that, I was still building up what became a large part of my travel business,” he said, referring to Crimson Travel, the travel agency he later started. “It started with the trips to Bermuda, and then it became Bermuda and the Bahamas, [and later] Europe.” 

By the time Paresky finished business school, his education had opened the doors to several job offers, including from Boston Consulting Group and General Electric. “But I had this travel thing going, so I decided to keep it,” he said. “[My wife] Linda and I started Crimson Travel together, and it grew and grew, and I took over a company called Thomas Cook.” 

In 1989, Crimson Travel merged with Thomas Cook Travel, becoming the third-largest travel company in the U.S. Paresky sold the company to American Express in 1994. “By the end, I had over 4,000 employees and I was doing billions of dollars of business, and … we sold it, which allowed me to give back to Andover and Williams,” he said.

His donations funded the construction of Paresky Center, which opened in 2007. “[The donation] is gratitude on my part to recognize the great education and the opportunities I gained from my Williams education,” he said. He articulated this sentiment on a plaque that sits in Paresky, inspiring students to appreciate the opportunities they have access to and underscoring the importance of giving back to the community.

“I wanted students to appreciate the education they get from Williams, but have some sense of gratitude for the people who made it possible,” he said. 

Paresky hopes his generosity will inspire future students to give back as well. “I had hoped that the message would be that you’re benefiting from what people in the past have done, [and] you’ll give back so that kids in the future can have the same benefit,” he said.