Milestones Made As Housing With Love Walk Wraps Up

CCB MEDIA PHOTO: Walkers relax in Falmouth after completing the annual Bob Murray Housing with Love Walk Sunday

FALMOUTH – Tired from walking over one hundred miles during the past few days, Reverend John Rice, 75, and DJ Sullivan, 80, sat down inside Liam Maguire’s Irish Pub Sunday afternoon with cold beers and a collective sense of satisfaction.

They were reflecting on 12 years of involvement with the Bob Murray Housing With Love Walk, a Cape-wide event which raises money for local organizations combating the region’s housing issues.

Participants walk – some for a few miles, and others, the whole way – across Cape Cod, beginning in Provincetown and ending in Falmouth.

Rice and Sullivan, along with three others, earned the distinction of walking the whole way.

“The price of housing is going up faster than the wages, and if we want people in service positions [on pay them peanuts and expect them to live here,” Sullivan said.

Rice said he raised over $4,000 last year, and expects this year to be about the same. Both men said they will still help raise funds for the walk next year, even if they don’t make the whole trek.

Richard Waystack and his wife, Bernadette, participants in the walk for years, said they felt inspired by the collective 1,200 miles Rice and Sullivan have logged before announcing their retirement from the exercise this year.

“You’re walking in the footsteps of the people for whom you do this,” Bernadette Waystack said.

“Everyone says, ‘oh, how do you do it?.’ But it is pretty easy when I remember I am going to a safe and secure house of my own every night, and I’m doing it for the people who aren’t.”

Bob Murray, who died in 2013, started the walk in 1993 and completed the entirety of the route each year. His event has raised over $4.5 million for nine social service agencies, including Housing Assistance Corporation, Champ Homes in Hyannis, the Chatham Ecumenical Council for the Homeless and the Community Development Partnership.

The Waystacks, who knew Bob and even pushed his wheelchair during his final walk, said it meant even more to them to finish the entire walk this year, with Rice and Sullivan retiring.

“For us, it’s a week,” Richard Waystack said. “But for many people, it’s every day, wondering where they will sleep that night.”