An event steeped in tradition becomes more and more apparent to this year’s fundraising committee chairman of Ducks Unlimited.

Burt Cestia III of New Iberia has an even greater appreciation of the general membership banquet and the sponsors banquet he will oversee starting at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Cyr-Gates Community Center. Cestia, 32, saw it as history relived itself in the pages of a scrapbook put together by a woman whose ex-husband was one of the straws that stirred the drink for the chapter that was born soon after 1970. Janice LaCaze of New Iberia has been putting it together in the months following the death of William “Cuz” Daugherty.

LaCaze showed Cestia after contacting longtime DU committee member Pat Caffery. The many headlines, newspaper clippings and photos all showed the popularity of the event that consistently drew 300-400 people in the 1970s and 1980s.

Advertisement

And, Cestia pointed out last week, the fundraiser really hasn’t changed that much. Almost 300 people have attended it the past several years, which brings it nearly on a par with the early days.

He anticipates a similar crowd Wednesday night when banquet-goers will dine on jambalaya and fried catfish served by caterer Bon Creole. They will have an opportunity to bid on the 2009 DU Gun of the Year, a Baretta White Onyx Over/Under 28-gauge shotgun. There’s also a Browning Silver Camo Hunter 12-gauge shotgun.

A scintillating auction item should be a hand-carved working canvasback decoy. All the auction items aren’t about waterfowling, he said, noting a baseball bat signed by former LSU football and baseball standout Jared Mitchell, who played at Westgate High School.

There will be some dedicated people reaching for their wallets, like Daugherty did in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“I think he contributed a lot. He was a good DU man. The man loved the outdoors,” said Charlie Brown of New Iberia, a consultant for new home construction who also taught Daugherty at the old vo-tech trade school in Iberia Parish.

Brown was one of the active DU committee members in the 1980s and 1990s. He was part of highly successful fundraisers among people willing to contribute to preservation of the country’s waterfowl habitat.

Cestia flipped a page over and found a quote in an Oct. 18, 1981, story about the banquet from Daugherty, who said, “I want to put my money into something that I know 80 cents of my dollar is going into something I enjoy.”

That something was duck hunting and there are so many people like him today, young and old, who still feel that way.

DON SHOOPMAN is outdoors editor of The Daily Iberian.