Robert ‘Bob’ Leslie Rummer was born in Davenport, Washington, on May 26, 1927, and died at 97 on January 31, 2025. He was married in Newberg, Oregon, on February 25, 1949, to Phyllis Jean Bailey, who was born in Nebraska on August 24, 1929, and died at 91 on March 17, 2021. Both died in Portland, Multnomah County, Oregon. Bob and Phyllis are survived by their daughter, Cynthia J. Morton of Beaverton, Oregon.
Bob’s parents were Leslie (Les) and Agnes Rummer. Bob attended schools in Davenport and Centralia, Washington, and finished in Dallas, Oregon, where his father was a tailor and owned a dry-cleaning business.
After serving two years in the U.S. Navy as an aviation radio operator, Bob Rummer tried to enroll at the University of Washington in Seattle, but with the classrooms already full of other veterans eligible for tuition assistance from the GI Bill, he attended Pacific Lutheran University in Parkland, Washington, for one year, then transferred to Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon.
He was 21 when he met his future wife, Phyllis, then 19, in front of a Newberg movie theater. “She was waiting for her dad to pick her up and I wanted to get to know that girl,” Rummer would say.
Life and career
He started in business opening a general insurance agency in Newberg selling life insurance, a profession the highly sociable Rummer was not that fond of. “No one wanted to talk about my insurance business,” he has said.
Still, he was successful, and it still exists. In 1961, when he decided to be a builder full-time, he sold the business to Ray Hopp, who renamed it Hopp Insurance Agency.
Bob Rummer did not have experience with floor plans, building, or developing when he bought a property off Villa Road, which was then outside of Newberg. He created a subdivision, later annexed by the City of Newberg, and built a house for his family in 1959. Bob would recall, “You’ve heard the story about my wife going south and finding a house she’d rather have?” Soon after, Phyllis visited her sister in Northern California, upon returning, she told her husband she wanted to trade their new, traditional-style house for a modern Eichler she saw in Walnut Creek’s Rancho San Miguel subdivision in California. Naturally, Bob ignored her suggestion for a year until in 1960, he read a story on Eichler homes in Look magazine. He studied the photographs and saw an opportunity. At 34, he sold his insurance business and launched Rummer Homes by setting up a makeshift drafting table, with a sheet of plywood on two sawhorses, in the living room of their home.
Rummer invited A. Quincy Jones to travel to Portland and paid the architect $500 in 1961. Rummer hired a young local architect, Toby Moore, to draw blueprints based on Jones’ designs of modern home plans printed in Sunset and other magazines.
Rummer relied on an in-house sales force to promote the merits of energy-efficient radiant heated floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, multiple sliding glass doors, and Roman-style sunken baths, amongst other unique features. Bob built these mid-century modern homes (about 300) in and around the Portland metro area, with many clustered in Garden Home, Beaverton, Oak Hills, Lake Oswego, Gresham, and more.
In 1985, Bob and Phyllis sold their Rummer-built home in Southwest Portland’s Bohmann Park tract, where he built 64 houses and named a street Cynthia Terrace after his daughter.
They moved to San Bernardino, California, and started a mortgage business, which is still operating. Later, they moved to Medford, Oregon, continuing to concentrate their efforts on another mortgage business before they retired in Woodburn, Oregon.
Rest in peace, you will be missed.
By Stan Houseman, 2025
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