Longtime West End resident Rita Carniglia Hall dies at 89

Early on, the mostly Italian west side of Santa Rosa was pretty much the extent of the world to Rita Carniglia Hall, who was born there 90 years ago March 26.

But as a child she felt neither confined nor deprived. Her playgrounds were Santa Rosa Creek and the great brick cannery owned by the California Packing Co. and run by her father, Charles Carniglia.

She would recall to chronicler of Santa Rosa history Gaye LeBaron the amenities of the cannery’s free preschool: double glider swings, slides, teeter-totters, meals and snacks and a wonderland of toys.

Hall never left Santa Rosa for very long, and she became a generous source of West End/Railroad Square history for LeBaron and people dedicated to preserving and honoring that part of town.

“She really inspired us to do what we’re trying to do down here,” said Allen Thomas, co-founder of the West End Neighborhood Association. “She was sharp; she remembered all the names.”

Preparations for Hall’s 90th birthday party were well underway when she died Friday morning after an illness of just a few days.

“Now we’ll celebrate her life in a different way,” said one of her four daughters, Sue Nelson of Windsor. Instead of a party on March 28, there will be a funeral service at a location always dear to Hall, St. Rose Church.

Hall was one of three children of Charles and Rose Carniglia, whose own parents had come to America from northern Italy. Hall and her two brothers, Charles and Al, grew up in the packing-plant superintendent’s house on West Sixth Street.

“It was a quiet neighborhood,” she told the West End Association’s Lea Barron-Thomas for a newsletter article in 2009. “It was a good place to raise children. All the holidays everybody did the same things. They had their big family dinners and family gatherings.”

Young Hall adored Lena Bonfigli Blake, proprietor of the neighborhood’s social hub, Lena’s restaurant. She attended St. Rose School, then went on to the former Ursuline High School, graduating in wartime 1943.

She studied at Santa Rosa Junior College and worked for a time for her father, who, following the closing of the packing plant, became an insurance broker.

She praised the day that Irish-American Jack Hall came into her life.

“They met on a blind date at the movie theater in Sebastopol,” remembered Nelson.

The two would be married for 50 years.

“They were like this perfect couple. They were almost like newlyweds,” said friend Ernesto Olivares, the former longtime Santa Rosa police officer and current city councilman.

He was pleased to spend time with Rita Hall just two weeks ago at a polenta dinner of the Young Men’s Institute. “She was just an elegant, graceful woman,” Olivares said.

The Halls raised their family a few miles from the West End, in a neighborhood off West College Avenue. Rita Hall was renowned for her grand holiday parties and family dinners.

“She loved to entertain,” said daughter Nelson. “There was always room for more people.”

Jack Hall died in 2003. A few years later his widow moved into the Spring Lake Village retirement community.

She was active in the North Bay Italian Cultural Foundation and St. Rose Church, and she never tired of pulling out notes or summoning memories for anyone interested in what life was like in Santa Rosa’s Italian district in the early 20th Century.

“She always said she’d write a book,” daughter Nelson said. “She never got the book done.”

But she was helpful to LeBaron, who co-authored two books of Santa Rosa history, and to keepers of West End heritage such as Barron-Thomas.

Once Barron-Thomas escorted Hall back into her childhood home on West Sixth Street, the one reserved for the packing house superintendent’s family.

The two of them were taking the stairs to the second floor when a footfall on one particular step caused Hall to stop and come near to tears.

“It still squeaks in the same spot,” she said.

Hall was doing well until she fell ill on Monday. Loved ones said their goodbyes at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, where she died early Friday morning.

In addition to her daughter in Windsor, she is survived by her other daughters, Christine Carr and Luann Scally, both of Santa Rosa, and Mary Eickmeyer of Cotati, and six grandchildren. A great-grandchild is due this summer.

The March 28 service at St. Rose Church will begin at 10:30 a.m.

Hall’s family suggests memorial contributions to the Carniglia Family Scholarship at Cardinal Newman High School, 50 Ursuline Road, Santa Rosa 95403, or to the Santa Rosa Junior College Foundation, 1501 Mendocino Ave., Santa Rosa 95401-4395.