Aida Link Brenneis was born August 25, 1922 to Captain Frank Sutter Link and Aida Verdi Link in Berkeley California. She lived in Berkeley for 101 years.
Aida, who died on May 15 from complications of a stroke, did many things over her long, long life.
She got her driver’s license at age 14 so that she could drive her father, a captain in
the U.S. Army Transport Service, down to an awaiting vessel.
A talented piano player, she worked as an accompanist while still in high school, also becoming calligrapher, scholar, costume designer, set builder, actor, singer and dancer while still a student.
Over her lifetime, Aida drove at least one million miles.
Here are some of the places she went: She took us to the mountains and to Los Angeles every year. We went to Disneyland, the 1962 World’s Fair, the Fillmore Auditorium, the Monterey Jazz Festival and Point Lobos. We visited an infinity of California beaches, where we collected the stones and shells she used to build the bathroom in her magnum opus, her dream house in the Berkeley Hills.
In 1970, she traversed the continental United States by car.
She took us to school. She took us to the mountains again. She would take anyone to the mountains, really — she loved it there.
She drove endless carpools to exercise and kept her friends going for decades. She took her family, friends and foreign visitors to the beaches, the deserts, the oceans, to the airport, to the doctor, to the dump.
Aida had a lifelong love of the theater, starting back in high school.
She followed her high school friend Grace Fretter to UC Berkeley where they immersed themselves in the Cal Drama Department.
At Cal, she appeared onstage as well as backstage, where she met Jon Brenneis. She succeeded him as Manager of the Cal Little Theater. Their partnership became lifelong; a thing of beauty and a joy to behold. A number of their college chums went into show business, but Aida and Jon worked in local theater for the love of it.
After World War II was well underway they married. Aida was intrinsic to Jon’s success as a freelance photojournalist and magazine photographer. They had three children, John, Lisa, and Marty.
Aida learned so much from her mother and father: how to turn wood and make furniture, how to set stone, how to build a garden. How to make ravioli from scratch.
Her grandparents Katerina and Antonio Verdi built their own Berkeley house and designed their own gardens, as did her parents.
Aida designed and supervised construction of the first Brenneis house, a modest modern in Park Hills and as the family grew larger, started to plan a larger house that turned into quite a real estate deal for a pair of 30-somethings without steady jobs.
When asked about their confidence in building such a magnificent house Aida said “I just kept drawing. I would show Jon my ideas and ask if we really could do it and he would always say ‘please make it how you want it to be’”.
Aida and Jon’s house was designed to be a gathering place and was the site of holiday celebrations, New Year’s Eve parties, Boxing Day celebrations, gourmet dinners, wedding receptions, memorials, rehearsals and weeknight hamburger meals.
Aida pursued numerous crafts, including designing copper jewelry, candlemaking, papermaking and ceramics. She made most of her own clothes and then in the 70s got into making her own tents, sleeping bags and backpacks. She made furniture. She and Jon designed and fabricated an underwater housing for their movie camera — in the kitchen.
Ceramics became her abiding love due to her close relationship with the potter Mary Murchio. Mary saw Aida’s gift, took her in hand and led her down the path of systematic glaze and clay testing, got her to write her recipes down so she could reproduce some of the beautiful things they made together. Every Thursday, Mary had friends over to her home for tea and pot making. Mary would fire their work.
Aida was very proud of the groundbreaking work she pursued with the other founders of Audubon Nature Training (ANT), a classroom program for elementary students. Aida appeared at countless classrooms in the East Bay, and moved on to training teachers in the ways of ANTs.
Decades after her youngest had graduated from Berkeley High School, Aida and her friend Corinne Eno were a volunteer support core for Berkeley High’s drama productions, producing costumes, and introducing kids to the mysteries of stage makeup.
For many years, Dave Michener, Pat Carmichael and Aida led annual Girl Scout backpacking trips in the high Sierra — 10 days of travel across the mountaintops.
Aida’s love of the Sierra started very early in life when she would spend summers up at the Dardanelle cabin of her uncle Joe Verdi. She returned to the Sierras every summer and many of us have traveled to the high country with her.
She loved to hike cross-country and could recite the names of the trailheads and mountains as we traveled over the summits, calling them out like a line in a song.
As the daughter of a San Francisco Bay “bar pilot” whose job was to guide the big ships into their berths, her sense of direction and memory for landmarks and places were astonishing and gave her great joy and satisfaction.
Did anyone love the state of California more than Aida Brenneis?
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