Floramay Cootes Caletti, champion of the one-room Daniels School, dies at 94

A little more than 8 miles from Healdsburg, surrounded by redwood trees off winding, rural Mill Creek Road, sits the little one-room Daniels School.

Built over the course of eight days in 1883 of old-growth redwood, it was abandoned after?68 years of pattering school children in 1951 - empty and exposed to the elements. That is, until Floramay Cootes Caletti came along in the late 1990s and decided it was time to save her old childhood schoolhouse.

“I think that was really her true home out there on Mill Creek,” said her daughter, Carla Caletti. “Restoring the school was her dream. If that could live on in her memory, she’d be so happy.”

Cootes Caletti died March 8 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 94.

Born to Walter W. Cootes and Elsa VanderHoff on April 17, 1923 in the countryside outside of Healdsburg, she attended school at the Daniels School all the way up until eighth grade, walking or riding her horse the half mile from her family’s property.

“My mom stayed very connected to the land she grew up on,” Caletti said. “Even though we were raised in downtown Santa Rosa, we went up there on weekends, and she would work the property. She knew how to use a chainsaw, and she’d always be working on the road so it stayed clear after storms.”

That Cootes Caletti was handy with a chainsaw comes as no surprise. This was a woman, after all, who went down to Marin City with her father as a teenager during World War II and worked as a welder on ships.

“She was kind of a Rosie the Riveter because she was tiny and they could send her into these crannies in the ship to weld,” Caletti said.

That strong, independent spirit was a permanent aspect of her life. After the war, she earned a degree and a teaching certificate from San Francisco State University, commuting from Healdsburg, before returning to teach fourth grade at another school out on Mill Creek Road - Junction School.

That’s where she first met Bonnie Cussins Pitkin, 71, back in 1953, when Pitkin was one of Cootes Caletti’s students.

“I was totally enamored by her,” Pitkin said. “She just had the biggest smile. I was telling (her daughter) Carla the other day about her two-toned high heels. They were brown and white and I used to just watch her walk around.”

Decades later, when Cootes Caletti fell ill, Pitkin took up the cause, bringing the renovation of the Daniels School to near-completion. It’s work that Cootes Caletti had done herself, saw in hand, alongside her husband, Richard Caletti, and other workers for as long as she could.

“She had an affinity for the one-room school houses,” Caletti, her daughter, said. “She thought it was important to preserve history in general, and then, of course, she had a specific relationship to the Daniels School. She wanted to restore the building for her own personal interest in it, and she also envisioned it as a gift to the community so other people could enjoy it and see this part of history that was lost, really.”

Pitkin’s family owned the schoolhouse and the land it sits on before they donated it to the Venado Historical Society, which Cootes Caletti established with the help of the Healdsburg Museum.

Pitkin said that final phases of the schoolhouse’s restoration are planned for this summer, with a grand opening tentatively scheduled for September.

Much of the kind of woman Cootes Caletti was is clear from her tenacity and perseverance in restoring the Daniels School, and it’s even more clear when her daughter talks about the way her parents met: on a snowy night in Lake Tahoe, where her mother would drive with her convertible top down, skis sticking out the back. And when she talks about how her mother took a semester of Swahili at Santa Rosa Junior College back in the ’80s before a solo trip to Kenya, just to better prepare.

Cootes Caletti would take her sons Steve and John and her daughter Carla out into the woods for camping trips, leaving her husband at home. And at age 50, she took up sailing.

“My mom loved an adventure, and she instilled that spirit in all of her children and grandchildren,” Carla Caletti said.