Obituary: Longtime director of Listening House believed in offering ‘radical hospitality’

Mary Divine, Pioneer Press
Updated ·9 min read

Rosemarie Reger-Rumsey believed in offering those in need an extravagant welcome.

Reger-Rumsey served as the executive director of Listening House of St. Paul, a drop-in center for the unhoused, for 20 years. The nonprofit organization is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

“She just had uncompromising compassion for the people she served,” said former St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman. “The whole concept of Listening House – to just be present to people who are unheard and unseen – was the most amazing thing when I first got to know about it, and Rosemarie was the perfect person to lead it.”

Reger-Rumsey died Monday surrounded by family members at her house in St. Paul’s Crocus Hill neighborhood of complications related to lung cancer. She was 72.

Listening House is a community center where unhoused and disadvantaged adults can spend time during the day and evening, take a nap, read a book, do laundry, watch a movie, play cards, pick up mail, get a snack and find fellowship. Staff and volunteers can help people with employment applications, chemical-dependency treatment, hygiene, Social Security and other government assistance.

Listening House is leasing the basement of the First Lutheran Church, located at 463 Maria Ave., near Swede Hollow Park, but will soon be moving to a new permanent location at the site of the former Red’s Savoy restaurant on East Seventh Street and Lafayette Road.

The construction of the new building and upcoming move, slated for September, couldn’t have happened without Reger-Rumsey’s groundwork, said Molly Jalma, executive director of Listening House since December 2020.

“We are certainly standing on her shoulders,” Jalma said. “We couldn’t, by any means, be where we are right now without all the service that she provided. We were really hoping she was going to get a chance to see it.”

Listening House is “all about radical hospitality,” Jalma said. “It started that way, and Rosemarie really continued that legacy of welcoming people in – that there will always be a place in St. Paul where we will learn people’s names, people will get treated with dignity, and we will ask them what they need, and try and find ways to say ‘Yes.’ That is her legacy. That is what Listening House is, and it’s something that we honor every day.”

Reger-Rumsey’s obituary has been posted at Listening House, and guests have been sharing stories about her this week, Jalma said.

“People talk about her and her belief in them,” she said. “Even just eye contact and remembering their name can be such a transformative experience. She has done that with thousands of individuals, and St. Paul is better for it, for sure.”

In an interview with the Pioneer Press in 2015, Reger-Rumsey said Listening House was founded to “serve people who are disadvantaged, lonely or homeless.”

“I overheard someone describe us as Starbucks for the poor,” she said in the interview. “Starbucks’ mission is to inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup, one community at a time, and I thought, ‘Wow, we’re not too different.'”

Partnership with police

Reger-Rumsey was instrumental in teaching officers at the St. Paul Police Department about the needs of the unhoused, said John Harrington, who served as police chief from 2004 to 2010.

“Rosemarie was the first person to explain homelessness to me,” he said. “Within a few weeks of my becoming chief of police, Rosemarie and I sat down together, and she talked me through what homelessness was like in St. Paul. We had already been doing a few things, and she talked to me about what was effective and what was still needed.”

Reger-Rumsey talked about the “three Ps” – people, pets and property – when explaining some of the challenges that people who are unsheltered run into, Harrington said.

“Listening House was a place where the homeless were heard,” he said. “All too often you walk past them, or they are viewed as largely invisible, people ignore them, walk by them. Rosemarie took the time to listen to their stories and to not just listen in sort of a social-worker way, but to actually listen with a huge heart to try and actually understand what was behind the symptom of being unhoused.”

The partnership between the SPPD and Listening House grew out of a chance encounter in January 2004. A police officer noticed the lights on at the Listening House, then located at 215 W. Ninth St., at a time when the building was normally closed. He stopped by to make sure everything was OK and introduced himself to Reger-Rumsey. She invited him to come back on occasions other than arrests.

The officer and his police partner started stopping by to talk with homeless people, sometimes playing a game of cards or chess if it wasn’t busy — “community policing at its best,” Reger-Rumsey told the Pioneer Press in 2005.

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When the Republican National Convention came to St. Paul in 2008, it was members of the police department who first approached Coleman with their concerns about clients at the Dorothy Day Center and Listening House, Coleman said.

“I think that’s the greatest testament to her work,” he said. “They came and they said, ‘We’ve got to protect our folks. That was a complete derivative of her work. This work was never about Rosemarie, it was always about the people and embedding that sense of caring in all who come into contact. I always thought it would have been great to put a sign up on Listening House for all the TV cameras to see (during the RNC) that said, ‘This is how St. Paul treats its most vulnerable.’ It was just such an incredible example of true Christian charity, but dignity more than anything.”

Right person, right time

Reger-Rumsey was the right person at the right time to lead Listening House, said former St. Paul Mayor George Latimer, a longtime friend and neighbor.

“The qualities that she had to unite diverse parts of the community, all focused on helping the people who really needed it, were remarkable,” he said. “Listening House was all about people listening to them. She named it perfectly.”

Church of the Assumption, where Reger-Rumsey was a longtime member, helped open the first Listening House in 1983. She learned about an opening on the board while reading the church’s bulletin and decided to apply, said Tim Rumsey, her husband.

Reger-Rumsey had previously worked as a pediatric nurse at Minneapolis General Hospital, now Hennepin County Medical Center, where she worked with families in need, and her fellow board member “saw her expertise and interest in serving those folks,” said Rumsey, who founded United Family Practice, a free clinic in St. Paul’s West 7th neighborhood.

Applying to be director when the position became open was the next logical step, he said.

“It was all about relationships,” he said. “She believed in knowing people’s names, and that people really need recognition as fellow human beings and being treated as friends and partnering with the community that they are a part of. It wasn’t top-down or coming in as saviors or missionaries. We were fellow citizens. It was coming in as fellow human beings and neighbors.”

‘Loved a big, noisy house’

Rosemarie “Rosebud” Reger was born and raised in Robbinsdale. She grew up with six siblings and multiple foster children in the house, and came from a large Catholic family with “more than 60 cousins,” said her daughter, Emily Rumsey of Minneapolis.

“They just loved a big, noisy house,” she said. “That set the stage for mom being director of a homeless shelter later on. She had an open-door policy at our house growing up. She believed that everyone needs a place to belong. That was her mission. Hospitality was her gift – professionally and personally.”

Reger attended Ascension School and Robbinsdale Senior High and “dreamed of traveling the world as a flight attendant after graduation,” Emily Rumsey said. “Airlines required a couple of years of service experience, so she strategically enrolled in nursing school at Anoka Ramsey Community College.”

That decision ultimately led her to a lifetime of nursing and social work, Emily Rumsey said.

In 1977, she met Tim Rumsey, a doctor who grew up in St. Paul, while working at Minneapolis General. “It was a doctor-nurse love story,” Emily Rumsey said. “My dad had pegged mom as someone he wanted to marry early on.”

The couple became engaged after three weeks of dating and got married at the Church of the Ascension in Minneapolis. The reception was at Summit House in St. Paul. “My mom always said she married into St. Paul,” Emily Rumsey said.

When Reger “told another doctor that she was going to marry Tim Rumsey, he said, ‘Tim Rumsey? That reprobate?’ and she smiled,” she said. “I think she liked the idea of doing that.

“They had a really excellent relationship. They shared a social-justice mindset and a passion for serving the unhoused. They taught us that we need to care for each other with a nonjudgmental listening love.”

The couple “fought for the underdog in different ways,” Emily Rumsey said. “My dad was quiet and respectful, whereas my mom brought the fight to the table. They were a perfect balance in that way. They very much worked together and loved together equally well.”

In a joint letter to the editor of the Pioneer Press in 2003, Reger-Rumsey and Rumsey wrote that “making deep cuts to health, education, safety and public assistance is no way to keep Minnesota strong.”

“Ignoring basic human needs diminishes our sense of common decency and makes for meaner neighborhoods that eventually impact every community,” they wrote. “It is vitally important that our elected leaders look beyond the next biennium and anticipate the potential harm of refusing to consider taxes as part of the solution to this budget crisis.”

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Family and “doing hard work” were the things that fueled her, Emily Rumsey said.

“She thought that the best work best happens by rolling up your sleeves and working at the table with other people,” she said. “That was her core approach, and I think it was why she was so effective.”

In addition to her husband Tim and daughter Emily, Reger-Rumsey is survived by daughters Leslie Rumsey and Glynis Rumsey and four grandchildren.

Her funeral will be 2 p.m. July 28 at Assumption Church in St. Paul, with visitation one hour prior to the service at the church and from 4-8 p.m. July 27 at O’Halloran and Murphy Funeral Home in St. Paul.

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