Late one night, the phone rang at Florence Lee's house. A woman was on the run with her three children, trying to find safety from an abusive man. Aunty Florence went flying to the rescue, slipping off into the night without a word to her family.

"I needed another pair of eyes to look on the right while I drive and look on the left," Rita Martin recalls. Martin and Lee worked together at a Parents and Children Together domestic violence shelter. "I picked Florence up at 10:30. I didn't even ask if her adult son knew where she was going. We went all through Waimanalo from the pavilion, campsite to campsite in the pitch dark looking for these four."

The rescue operation was unorthodox. Women in crisis are supposed to be picked up somewhere safe, at a police station. But there was no time for procedure that night.

After an hour, they circled back to the first campsite and found the woman and her children hiding there and took them to safety.

"When I brought Florence home at midnight, I told her, 'Try and creep in so your son won't be scolding me,' " Martin said.

That was a favorite story among a treasury of hundreds, maybe thousands, of times Florence Lee came to somebody's rescue.

Lee taught elementary school for 28 years, but she was a teacher long before that and long after.

The way she saw it, she became a teacher in kindergarten. She was born in January 1934, the only girl in a family of three brothers.

When her older brother went to kindergarten, she wanted to go so badly that she convinced everyone to let her tag along. The next year, when it was her turn to start school, she had already been through all the lessons, so the teacher made her a helper to teach the other children.

It was the first call to her lifelong mission.

As a teacher at Keolu Elementary, she was known for the gentle way she helped pupils work through their troubles.

In one corner of her classroom, she kept a desk stocked with pencils and pens and markers. Nearby was a little wastebasket.

"When children were going through a difficult time in their lives, when they needed a time-out, she would tell them, 'You need time for yourself,' " Martin explains. "They would sit in the corner — but it was a nice corner. She would put nice things on the wall — and the children would start writing poetry."

Often, the kids would throw away what they had written, but Lee would retrieve their work from the rubbish can.

"The things she found in the rubbish can, the children were expressing their true feelings about what they were going through. She said the greatest work was from the trash can."

Lee got divorced in 1976 and raised her three children as a single mom. She worked a second job to make ends meet. When things got rough, she tried to figure out why her life was so hard. The answer, she decided, was that she needed to give back more. So, in addition to her two jobs, she became a volunteer for the Suicide and Crisis Center.

After retiring from Keolu Elementary, she got even busier. Her volunteer work made her realize that she was good at helping people in crisis, and that she was particularly good at helping domestic violence victims.

So for 15 years, she had a second career as a counselor for PACT.

She taught classes for victims of domestic violence, she ran group meetings, she even taught abusers how to be better fathers and husbands.

"She was only 4-foot-10, but she got the perpetrators to listen," Martin said.

She also made it a point to follow up with women long after they left the shelter, helping them fill out paperwork, navigate the legal system, and celebrate their achievements, as with one woman who went on to become a published author.

"We have women who have started their own business. We have women who have gotten their GED or gone back to college. We have women who have come back to this shelter to volunteer."

Her last teaching assignment came as a surprise. It started with some terrible news.

"She called me to her home in Kailua, " Martin remembers. "She gave me a handwritten letter that said she was resigning from PACT. As I read the letter, toward the end, she said she was found to have ovarian cancer, stage 4," Martin said. "And in the same breath, she said she wanted me to do her eulogy and she wants me to keep it light! She drops this bomb and then says she wants me to keep it light!"

True to form, Lee saw a new way she could teach and help.

"She registered with the cancer hot line and through the Internet saying that she would talk to any victims that were struggling with having cancer," Martin said. "She was dying of cancer so she's there helping people with cancer. She was always extending herself to others who, she felt, need the help more than she did."

Lee wanted to start a support group for other people with stage 4 ovarian cancer, but she couldn't find any. She was one of the few still alive.

When she got too sick to run her domestic violence groups, the groups came to her.

"My mom really helped to empower so many people that were facing obstacles in their own lives," says her daughter Michelle. "She literally helped thousands of women get themselves and their children out of abusive relationships and rehabilitated a lot of men in the process."

Lee's struggle with cancer lasted 3 1/2 years. She died Aug. 26 in Kailua with her children, Steven, Diane and Michelle at her side.

"At the funeral, there was standing room only," Martin said. "One of the people she had helped looked at the crowd and said, 'This is Florence's village. Look at all the people from all walks of life who have come to celebrate her life.' "

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.