Jane Rumsey Voigt

Obituary for Jane Voigt November 2017

Jane Rumsey Voigt, age 93, died peaceably on Thanksgiving evening, Nov. 23, at the Methodist Country House in Greenville, Delaware, where she was under hospice care. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., on March 30, 1924, she was the daughter of Jaques Stryker of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Florence Bliss of Tarrytown, N.Y. She was the widow of James Spencer Rumsey, whom she married in 1944. After he died in 1978, she married Robert Louis Voigt in 1980. She graduated from the Park School in Buffalo in 1942 and attended Stratford Business School in Buffalo to learn secretarial skills in order to help with the war effort, instead of going to Smith College, William & Mary, or Parson’s School of Design, where she’d been accepted. She volunteered at the local USO. Once she was married to James Rumsey, she moved to Oak Ridge, Tenn., where he was working on the Manhattan Project for the DuPont Company. Later they moved to Richland, Washington, where she was captain of the Red Cross Motor Corps and drove a jeep around the Hanford Site facility. Settling in Wilmington, Delaware, after the war, she became an active member of the Junior League, performing in several productions at the Playhouse and producing a children’s TV show for PBS’s local Channel 12 affiliate. She was on the board of the Delaware Mental Health Association, as well as a volunteer at the State Mental Health Hospital (Farnhurst) and was appointed to the governor’s State Board of Mental Health. She was the secretary of the New Castle Republican Party, a district chair, and an alternate delegate, pledged to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, at the Republican National Convention in 1968 in Miami, Fla. An avid golfer, she won her flight class in a 1972 tournament at the Wilmington Country Club, where she belonged for many years. Later she became a realtor and was also assistant to the dean at the Delaware Law School (later Widener College). After marrying the recently widowed Robert Voigt, who’d been a family friend since he worked on the Manhattan Project with her husband, Jane left Delaware and moved to be with him in Chattanooga, Tenn., where he was the president and CEO of Dixie Yarns. While there, she hit a hole in one at the Signal Mountain Golf Course when she was in her 60s. When a neighbor died before an ambulance from the city could reach him, she organized the Signal Mountain CPR Task Force. After her second husband died in 2000, she moved back to Delaware and resided at the Country House until her demise. She donated her body to medical research.

She is survived by her daughter, Lee Rumsey Haga of Portland, Oregon; her son, Spencer Bartlett Rumsey (Jane Gudaitis) of Northport, N.Y.; and her son, Stuart Stryker Rumsey (Colleen) of Westport, Conn.; five grandchildren and a great grandson.

An informal memorial service for those in the area who knew her will be held in the Millcreek Lounge at the Country House on the afternoon of Dec. 9, 2017. In 2018, her remains will be interred at her family plot in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made on her behalf to Planned Parenthood and Vitas Healthcare of Delaware (VitasCommunityConnection.org).