School board chair time travels in DAR centennial celebration video

A La Conner civic leader helping shape the community’s future has also proved adept at bringing history to life.

Susie Gardner Deyo, who chairs the La Conner School Board, revisited vivid chapters of her family legacy through a 10-minute video as part of the recent centennial celebration in Anacortes of the Ann Washington chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.

The DAR is a lineage-based membership organization for women who are directly descended from a person involved in the United States’ efforts toward independence.

For the video, Deyo delved into character as her late great-grandmother, Adda Hulbert Gaches, the Ann Washington chapter’s founding regent.

Accompanied by a polished script, the video – set at the family’s West Shore Acres home north of La Conner – introduces viewers to key milestones in a life well lived, that of native Iowan Adda Gaches as portrayed by Deyo.

The film presentation substituted for an actual appearance by Deyo, an IBM software sales executive, who was out of state at the time of the DAR event. It was scripted, directed and produced by chapter Vice Regent Kim Kimmy and member Pamela McCunn.

“I had to do the video all in one shoot, so I had to remember all the dates and script,” she told the Weekly News afterward.

The single take couldn’t have come off more smoothly.

Dressed in period clothing, Deyo guides viewers through the grounds of West Shore Acres and then into the beautiful Victorian era house, describing prized mementoes as well as sharing anecdotes defining Gaches’ leadership role with DAR, tireless volunteerism on behalf of various women’s groups and advocacy of higher education.

“This house was host to many DAR events in the 1920s,” Deyo, in her portrayal of Gaches, notes. “as I advocated for a DAR chapter in Skagit County.”

Gaches, a 1902 graduate of famed Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in the Hudson River Valley, would deservedly take pride in the video as a learning resource.

The script reveals that Gaches’ lineage to DAR was through her mother, Mary Lianna Dunlap Hulbert. Gaches’ grandfather’s grandfather was Philip Clement, a revolutionary patriot born in 1744 in Haverhill, Massachusetts who was in his early thirties when the war broke out in New England.

Gaches herself would live a remarkable life.

In 1906 she married Charles Gaches, member of a pioneering family here. One of the first students to graduate from La Conner High School, also completed studies at the University of Washington.

Fifteen years later, in 1921, after having focused her “energy, mind and heart” into making a difference when it came to organizing several of the community’s leading women’s organizations, she was poised to conduct the first meeting of the Ann Washington chapter.

But less than a week before that much-anticipated session, terror struck.

Let Deyo, again assuming the Gaches persona, explain.

“On Jan. 3, 1921 was the first meeting of the Ann Washington chapter,” she said. “Just five days earlier, my family was held hostage here at the house. At noon on Dec. 30 a man appeared with a gun and a bottle of nitro, demanding $10,000 or he would kill us. My daughter, Beatrice, ran next door to Mrs. Downey’s to call the sheriff and my brother, Jim Hulbert. After several long hours, the man was shot and wounded in the driveway by the sheriff. I must admit, I was traumatized as we were in and out of the courthouse for the next week during all this time after the incident.

“It took over a week to identify the robber and he was sentenced to prison,” she added. “In the end, I kept my commitment to form the DAR chapter in Skagit County just five days after this event as this was several years in the making to get all our members approved to join.”

Deyo said numerous other DAR gatherings took place at the house over the next decade. One was a 1931 luncheon scheduled nine days after Bea Gaches and John Herbert Gardner were married there.

Adda Gaches passed away in 1933, at just 52 years of age, from influenza and pneumonia but not before being the winning litigant in a precedent setting auto collision case.

She was honored posthumously on Flag Day 1933 when a DAR marker was placed at her final resting place at nearby Pleasant Ridge Cemetery.

Thanks to Deyo’s portrayal in the video, Gaches was able to return the favor at the Ann Washington group’s centennial gala.

“I’m so proud of you,” she said, “to have kept the chapter alive and so strong with so many members today.”