The afternoon tea on Saturday at the Episcopal Homes common room on University Avenue will feature a special guest. Ruby Hunt, who served on the St. Paul City Council for a decade before a dozen years as a Ramsey County Commissioner in the 1980s and ’90s, is celebrating her 100th birthday.
Hunt, a former president of the League of Women Voters and the St. Paul Charter Commission during a transformative time for St. Paul politics, will be surrounded by her three daughters, a grandson and granddaughter, and her 12-year-old great-grandchild Oliver, as well as other fans she’s acquired over the past century.
When Hunt joined the St. Paul City Council in 1972, she was the third woman to join that body since the city’s incorporation in 1854. Elizabeth DeCourcy was elected to the council in 1956, and Rosalie Butler in 1970. Hunt served as a council member through 1982, including two years as council president, before being elected to serve the county board from 1983 to 1995.
In 2014, Hamline University created the Ruby Hunt Endowed Scholarship for Public Administration. U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum entered her achievements into the official Congressional Record on Nov. 12 of that year. Her political interests and activities have never stopped. She assists fellow residents at the Episcopal Homes apartments casting absentee ballots in every election, and joins fellow protesters outside her building, walker in hand, for street demonstrations against gun violence, among other causes.
Beginnings
Her beginnings were humble. Hunt, the only child of a seamstress and railroad blacksmith, grew up at 883 Tuscarora Ave. W. off West Seventh Street, and attended Monroe High School, where she was valedictorian. Her late husband, Richard Hunt, founded Hunt Electric while Hunt was a stay-at-home mom, occupying her free time with service to the League of Women Voters, the Girl Scouts and other organizations.
Prior to the early 1970s, city council members ran city departments themselves, so each elected official also doubled as an administrator, hiring and firing city employees while doling out services. The system leant itself to some self-serving chicanery, propping up “the classic neighborhood bigwig,” said her daughter Jane Hunt. “You had your personal favorites in your neighborhood, your family.”
Organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the city’s Charter Commission swooped in as reformers. At separate times, Hunt ran both.
Political work
Of all her political activities, Hunt is perhaps most associated with overseeing the process that created St. Paul’s home rule charter, which was approved by voters in 1970 and took effect in 1972. The city charter defines the powers and responsibilities of the mayor and city council, laying out the foundation for the “strong mayor” system in which the administration hires department leaders and the council approves the city budget.
“She ran for office as soon as it was adopted,” Jane Hunt said.
“It was a huge deal,” said former City Council President Kathy Lantry. “She’s very ‘here’s the role of the council, here’s the role of the mayor, and if everyone stuck to their lane, everything would run smoothly. She was very process oriented. That’s why she did so well with the charter. She was, ‘What should the process look like?’”
Lantry, who was first elected to the council in 1998, never overlapped with Hunt at City Hall, but her parents did.
“I remember her from my childhood,” said Lantry, whose mother was a city council legislative aide before becoming state senator, and whose father was a legislative aide before becoming a labor leader. “Everyone knew who Ruby was.”
Zeal and dedication
Hunt’s attention to process and detail sometimes clashed with the changing times. In 2004, when bronze statues of “Peanuts” characters Peppermint Patty and Marcie landed in Rice Park, Hunt joined a group of opponents who called on the city council to relocate them, arguing they clashed with the statue of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her campaign gained national attention, unsuccessful as it was.
Though she can laugh about it now, Jane Hunt recalled the “Peanuts” flap as mortifying at the time for family members, who saw her made momentarily famous by a comedy show. “She was interviewed by ‘The Daily Show’ … but they treated her well,” she said.
Her political zeal and dedication to St. Paul has served Hunt well at Episcopal Homes, said her daughter. “She’s still in independent living,” Jane Hunt said. “We’ve been talking to the Ramsey County Historical Society about keeping some of her documents.”
