Vice President, James Lomuscio
Q&A with James Lomuscio, 36, the new vice president of Brookline Together
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Weston, Conn., a town of about 10,000 people situated about an hour northeast of New York City. A good portion of the town's citizens commuted into the city each day and, as you might expect, it was a very wealthy town. I joked in a speech at high school graduation that the town's only industry was the manufacture of students. Folks move to Weston almost exclusively to be able to send their children to the public schools and many families soon leave town upon graduation of their youngest. I sometimes wonder if Weston, or any town, can be considered a real community if no one lives there longer than 20 years, no one who grows up there stays, and no one who leaves moves back. What's a community without an institutional memory that goes back even one generation? In those ways, Pittsburgh is the opposite of Weston. I don't need to enumerate all the ways in which Pittsburgh understands itself, all the ways the boomerangs get called back, all the ways that young men meet young women from here and find themselves making a family in Pittsburgh. It's
a major theme here: Pittsburghers stay, or they return, or they live here still in spirit, but they don't often leave.
What kind of family did you have growing up?
My one sister Meredith just moved to Columbus, Ohio, which is the closest we've ever lived to one another since I left town for Pittsburgh. We saw each other over Independence Day Weekend and had a delightful time.
My father and mother still live in Weston in the same house I grew up in. They get along well for their age. My father was a newspaperman. He got his start with an Italian paper in
Brooklyn and moved to Connecticut in his 20s to write for a Gannett paper called Fairpress, before exclusively freelancing for the Connecticut Post and the New York Times. He worked out of a home office on a Tandy 102, and though it had a modem, I'd often hear him phoning in his stories, dictating every "open quote" and "close quote". It only dawned on me a few years ago that my years
of listening to him work the phones to land and conduct interviews had a major impact on my own career in business development and entrepreneurship. My father wrapped up his freelancing career when he became the editor of a local paper, The Westport News, which he loved, and then the local magazine, Westport Magazine, which he hated. He has taught English, journalism, and other communications classes at a local community college and Western Connecticut State University for over 25 years. His next semester starts at the end of August! My mother was — and still is! — a church organist and an arts organizer in town. She started playing for Mass at the age of 13!
When did you move to Brookline and where did you move from?
My family moved to Brookline six years ago in May 2019, the night before I turned 30 years old. We moved from Highland Park (right behind St. Raphael's) to Brookline for two reasons: we had friends here in Brookline, and we could afford to buy a house here (and not in the East End). Prior to Highland Park, my wife Emily and I lived in Greenfield, where I also lived before we married. I spent two years in Pitt dorms before living in a Catholic men's house called Tilbury that at the time was in Greenfield. I've lived my entire adult life in the city of Pittsburgh.
Occupation and work background?
I came to Pittsburgh to study neuroscience at Pitt, but I discovered that my real interest was entrepreneurship. I founded a health IT company during college and dropped out to pursue that; we later sold the business to an electronic medial records company. Since then I've gotten involved in two startups connected to finance, one related to small business, the other to real estate data. My niche is helping a new business find — create is more like it — Product-Market Fit. I like building new things and selling people on why this new thing is worth their time
and attention. I call this missionary sales, as it's about jumping into a new market where you're an unknown, knocking on every door, and finding the first customers a business will ever have. I maintain a small office along the Boulevard, though you can often spot me working from the back porch at 802 Bean Company before 10 a.m.
Can you talk about your wife?
I married my wife Emily in 2013. She and I are both from Connecticut, but we met at the Newman Club at Pitt. We could have moved back to Connecticut, but we decided to make our life here.
Do you have kids?
Six of them! The oldest two — ages 10 and 9 — play Little League here. The others are 7, 4, 2, and 4 months.
Pets?
None. Zero time for another creature in the house.