About Rose
Biography
Rosina Pugliese Reschini, one of the first licensed women insurance agents in Pennsylvania and the first in Indiana County, and the founder of the Reschini Insurance Agency, is a member of the Class of 2022 of the Indiana County Business Hall of Fame.
Rose was born in southern Jefferson County, graduated from Punxsutawney High School and began work with the Glenn Insurance Agency.
She and Joseph R. Reschini were married in 1936 and moved the following year to Indiana. Rose continued her work in the insurance business at the Wilfred Helwig Agency, then started her own insurance agency in 1938 at age 28 at the suggestion and encouragement of her mother who immigrated from Italy as a child.
As a sole operator working with scant resources, it’s said that Rose wrote with a rented typewriter, calculated rates on a manual adding machine and relied on relatives’ networks of friends and business associates to pitch and generate business.
Holding the title “partner and secretary/treasurer,” Rose built her company into a pillar of the downtown Indiana financial community. Reschini Insurance – now the Reschini Group – is headquartered at Laurel Place on the 900 block of Philadelphia Street and operates today under a third generation of family ownership. Forty years after she founded the agency, Rose’s son Roger Reschini took ownership in 1979; her grandson Joe Reschini is now the president of the group and CEO of a partner agency, Evergreen Insurance.
The Reschini Group today stands as a leader in property/casualty insurance and employee benefits consulting. It has been ranked among the strongest businesses in Pennsylvania and has been named a Distinguished Family Business by the Eberly College of Business at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
For decades, the success of Reschini Insurance enabled Rose to devote her energy and leadership with community groups and organizations that served to uplift the people in need in the Indiana area: Indiana Hospital Auxiliary, Salvation Army Auxiliary, the American Cancer Society, the Love Basket Foundation, IUP’s deaf education program, the international student exchange program at IUP, the Catholic Daughters of the Americas, the Rotary Club and Quota Club among them.
The Quota Club formed the Gold Scholarship fund to assist non-traditional women in their educational efforts, in honor of Rose Reschini and Fran Supinka, both charter members of the organization.
Rose was honored as a Civic Leader of the Year, one of the 10 Notable Women of Indiana County, and a recipient of Indiana Medical Society’s Benjamin Rush Award. Three years before Rose passed away, the United Way in 1998 created the Rose Society in honor of her charitable and civic efforts. The society spotlights the most generous of United Way contributors and the most faithful of its volunteers.
The Quota Club, Meals on Wheels, the Angel Tree project and Newman Center at IUP, now St. Thomas More Parish, thrive today thanks to Rose’s passion for those causes at their inception.
The Indiana County Chamber of Commerce welcomes Rose Reschini to the Business Hall of Fame, Class of 2022.