Gwendolyn Griffith Brechin

1919 - 2017 “Intrepid” is the adjective that best describes Gwendolyn Griffith Brechin, born on the winter solstice in 1919. Gwen remained proud of her Welsh ancestry on her father’s side, visiting Wales and attending many Welsh-American events. She was a member of the First Methodist Church of Los Altos for over half a century.

Like her mother Maud, Gwen trained to be a schoolteacher at Indiana State Teachers College in Pennsylvania, but she longed to see a world larger than Irwin near Pittsburgh The Second World War gave her the ticket to escape by joining the Army Signal Corps and then marrying Sidney Brechin in 1945. The newlyweds moved to Spokane where they had two sons. In 1955 she divorced Sid and a year later, moved to California to the bigger world she forever sought. A teacher’s job in Cupertino at that time permitted her as a single mom to support her sons and to buy a ranchette in Los Altos where she lived for 38 years until moving to Palo Alto’s Channing House in 1997.

Always an avid reader, Gwen volunteered for San Francisco’s International Hospitality Center while teaching in order to meet foreign visitors and continue widening her horizons. Before the boys’ graduation in 1965, she drove the family 2000 miles north to catch the new Alaska State Ferry up the Alaska Panhandle and a train to the Yukon. That trip was only a warm up for the epic travels on which she embarked after her retirement in 1977 when she could indulge her wanderlust. She often traveled solo on steam ships, freighters, trains, and public transit on every continent but Antarctica, visiting her Alpha Sigma Alpha sorority sisters and high school pen pals and making new friends, always driven by her curiosity to see as much of her planet as she could while able. A fall in rural Thailand that gashed her arms in 2004 did not stop her: although growing unsteady by 2008 she nonetheless took a cruise to Mexico. She attended 28 Elderhostels.

Gwen suffered a heart attack in 2010 that severely debilitated her. She always asked the names of her attendants and talked with them about their home countries, most of which she had visited. She suffered progressive physical decline in subsequent years but never lost her prodigious memory.

She was predeceased by her brother Chester Griffith and her sister Margaret Bard and is survived by her sons Gray of Inverness and Vernon of Mountain View. Donations in her memory may be made to Compassion and Choices (https:// www.compassionandchoices.org, POB 101810, Denver, CO 80250)