Mardi Durham Gualtieri Bennett Brick passed away Feb. 26 at the age of 96. Though she lived her last decades in Santa Cruz, Mardi was a formidable and productive advocate of Los Gatos historical preservation and Santa Clara Valley transportation.
According to “Legendary Locals” by Peggy Conaway Bergtold and Stephanie Ross Mathews, Mardi was born in Reno, Nev. And “came to Los Gatos in 1952 with her physician husband. … The couple built a home at 58 Alpine Ave. after the house owned by John Whisenant burned down. She was a tireless volunteer. . .”
From the early 1970s to 1982, she took on the task of saving Forbes Mill, a stone flour mill built on Los Gatos Creek in 1854, making it the oldest surviving building in Los Gatos and part of the era when wheat was a main crop here. By 1972 Forbes Mill was little more than a pile of stones, where high school students played and homeless people built fires and slept. Mardi called for volunteers, applied for public and private aid, and got town approval to make the restored building, complete with original stones and beams, into a museum off Church Street.
To help celebrate the U.S. Bicentennial, Mardi launched Project Bellringer, which would help homeowners of certain pre-1900 houses in Los Gatos. “The goals were to ensure health and safety for the homeowners by updating electrical and plumbing facilities and to provide cosmetic improvement of the home by restoring authentic decorative aspects,” Lyn Dougherty wrote in “The Story of the Bellringers.”
“Federal aid as well as private investment allowed these homeowners to preserve the history of some of the Victorian houses in Los Gatos in neighborhoods which were beginning to deteriorate. 61 awards were given out on July 4, 1976.”
Symbols of the Bellringers were little bronze doorbell surrounds shaped like cats’ heads, designed by Lyn Johnson, funded by the Lions’ Club and made by Ron Cassel and his Los Gatos High School metal shop classes.
Mardi served on the Los Gatos Town Council from 1976 to 1980 and served as mayor in 1978.
She volunteered to be chairwoman of the West Valley Multimodal Transportation Corridor Task Force to lobby for the extension of Highway 85 to connect the West Valley with the rest of the South Bay.
Mardi “also founded the Los Gatos Preservation Society, . . . the History Museum of Los Gatos (which evolved into the New Museum of Los Gatos), wrote a newspaper column, published several books, founded her own consulting company and served as president of the Santa Clara County Medical Auxilary,” Bergtold wrote in “Images of Modern America, Los Gatos.”
For virtually all these efforts, Mardi raised legions of volunteers, gently nudging recalcitrant folks to agree to help. As some of those volunteers will attest, she never had to raise her voice to achieve her goals; she simply persisted and led by example. And she would always credit her volunteers and not herself.
The results of her endless effort and vision are around us, for all to use and enjoy, these many decades later.