Ramona Crinella, Forestville winemaker, former Coddingtown manager and clothier, dies at 84

Ramona Crinella achieved much in — and for — Sonoma County since her birth in Petaluma to Italian immigrants in 1938.

Crinella, who died June 6, managed Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa in the 1970s and ‘80s. Prior to going to work for the late developer Hugh Codding, she was manager of an early Santa Rosa television station.

She became essential to the preservation of Santa Rosa’s grand, 1910 post office and its transformation into a museum.

Crinella labored for decades to remake the heart of Forestville with a major housing and possibly retail development, but was rebuffed. So she pivoted to vineyards and to a winery of her own, and ultimately sold her family’s land to a larger wine company.

She co-owned the former Raffinee, a high-fashion women’s store in Santa Rosa’s Montgomery Village, trekking to New York, London and Paris on buying trips.

She served as an early leader of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women, and the Sonoma County Museum.

She was especially gleeful about being introduced to downhill skiing by her daughter, Teri Bloomquist, when she was 46 years old. She hit advanced runs in Tahoe as often as daily until she turned 80.

Recounting special moments in a brief autobiography, Crinella wrote, “Pleasant afternoons were often spent in the Forestville vineyard or on the deck of her (Santa Rosa) home with family and friends, sipping wine and discussing local and world events.” She closed offering “thanks to all those who so greatly enhanced her life.”

Said daughter Bloomquist, “She’s had about 20 times more fun than me.”

The two of them certainly shared some fun together. In addition to all the Tahoe skiing the pair did, they had a blast taking nice, old jewelry and such to appraisal events of the popular PBS program, Antiques Roadshow.

Bloomquist recalled that after waiting in a line for maybe nine hours to have an appraiser look at their pieces in Portland, they wound up sharing a cab with Antiques Roadshow regular Allan Katz.

“For the next three years,” said Ramona Crinella’s daughter, “he got us on the Antiques Roadshow VIP list.” No more waiting in the appraisal line.

Crinella died at Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center from complications of colon cancer. She was three weeks short of turning 85.

She was born in Petaluma to Marian and Marino Crinella. Her father built homes in Petaluma and Santa Rosa, and he served for a time on the Petaluma City Council. The city named Crinella Drive and Crinella Park near east Petaluma’s Casa Grande High School in Marino’s honor.

Ramona attended the private St. Vincent’s grammar and high school. Though she would not earn a college degree, she studied at San Francisco College for Women, now part of the University of San Francisco, and she held certificates for scholarly work completed at Harvard, Harvard’s law school and the American Academy of Art Conservation.

She would be married and divorced three times, and give birth to daughter Bloomquist and to sons Frank Walburg and Karl Walburg.

It was 1970 and Crinella was 32 when she went to work for Santa Rosa’s Channel 6 TV station. She rose to manager, a post she held until 1975, when leading Santa Rosa developers Hugh and Nell Codding hired her to run their regional shopping center.

Coddingtown had opened in 1962, a dozen years after the birth of the Coddings’ Montgomery Village center. In the early 1980s, Hugh Codding tried but failed to prevent the Simon Property Group from building a mall in downtown Santa Rosa.

Crinella wrote in her autobiography that she was part of a three-person Codding team that “worked several years to prepare and strengthen the Codding tenants of Montgomery Village and Coddingtown to compete with the new 800,000 square feet of retail space opening in Santa Rosa Plaza.”

She continued, “Instead of losing market share, the Codding centers showed an increase in total sales after the Plaza opened, which was a feat unheard of in the industry.”

In October 1969, a pair of earthquakes caused vast damage to old buildings in downtown Santa Rosa, and introduced an era of urban-renewal demolition and reconstruction. The city’s gracious, four-columned former post office building at Fifth and A streets was scheduled to be razed to make way for the Santa Rosa Plaza.

Crinella wrote in her autobiography that she took action to preserve the Post Office, “flying to Denver and convincing the National Trust for Historic Preservation that contrary to what the City of Santa Rosa had been saying, the City had made no effort to save it.” She wrote that she continued to press for the preservation of the Post Office until “the City announced it had found a way to move the building.”

Santa Rosans took in the spectacle when, over the course of 75 days in 1979, the 1,700-ton Post Office was placed onto rollers and beams, and ever so slowly moved the 750 feet to Seventh Street.

It opened as the Sonoma County Museum in 1985. Today it and the adjoining art museum comprise the Museum of Sonoma County.

Crinella served on the museum’s board of directors and chaired the Commemorative Ball that celebrated its opening.

For decades, Crinella was occupied by an effort to build on an expanse of land her family owned in Forestville, a development she believed would grace the Russian River town. But a succession of proposals for new homes and retail businesses at Mirabel Road and Highway 116 were stymied by critics of the plans.

The Press Democrat reported in February 2004:

“Attempts by the Crinella family to develop its 72-acre property in Forestville may hold the record for the longest development effort in Sonoma County.

Marino Crinella launched the effort in 1977 with a plan to subdivide the property into 134 single-family home sites. But strenuous community opposition and years of public hearings whittled away at the project's size and ultimately outlasted Crinella, who died in 1988.

Ramona Crinella took up the project following her father's death and counts nine separate project proposals over 27 years, enduring rigorous hearings and an environmental review process that doomed each project.

“It's been horrendous,” Crinella said. “I've come at this so many different ways to try to figure it out. What kept me going was that I always felt if we hung on, we would come up with something good.”

No development project was ever approved. In 2000, Crinella planted premium sauvignon blanc grapes on 40 acres of the Forestville land. She sold the grapes, then began making her own wines. Her first, Crinella Sauvignon Blanc, won a Silver Medal at the Sonoma County Harvest Fair.

She left the grape growing and winemaking to others after selling the Forestville land to Silver Oak Cellars of Alexander Valley and Napa Valley.

Always active and fit, Crinella was sailboarding on San Francisco Bay into her 50s and far beyond that aced even the steepest runs at the ski resort known now at Palisades Tahoe.

In addition to her daughter Teri Bloomquist of Bend, Oregon, she is survived by sons Frank and Karl Walburg, both of Santa Rosa; and by three grandchildren.

At Crinella’s request, there will be no services.