When Bette Badraun Gwathmey decided rural King William County schoolchildren needed more educational opportunities, she was instrumental in founding Aylett Country Day School in 1966.

When she thought the county needed more shopping variety, she opened the Little Flower gift shop in Tappahannock during the 1970s.

As she saw residents of crowded Hanover County spilling into King William, she became a Realtor and, with her husband, Owen, developed several hundred acres that became the gated Woodruff community.

The 78-year-old Tappahannock resident died of acute renal failure Tuesday in a Henrico County hospice.

Decades earlier, she was severely injured in a car crash. The Gwathmeys, whose first child was stillborn, lost their second during a rainy night when the pregnant Mrs. Gwathmey and her husband were thrown from their car in the accident.

"She remembered the car teetering and falling on top of them in a ravine. She was in a total body cast for a year. Doctors said she would never have [more] children and walk again. But she was a determined person," said a daughter, Garnett Copeland of Tappahannock.

She had four children between 1957 and 1964 and regained her ability to walk.

Mrs. Gwathmey loved to paint in acrylics and watercolor. She also liked to express herself and wrote a novel that was never published.

"She was very flamboyant. Outspoken. A passionate person. Any project or idea she came up with, she'd follow it through to the very end. She was a homemaker who had careers," Copeland said.

Mrs. Gwathmey will be remembered at a memorial service Friday at 2 p.m. at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Millers Tavern, where she had served on the vestry. A private burial will be held in the Gwathmey family cemetery at the family's ancestral home, Burlington, in Aylett.

A native of Portland, Ore., she grew up in Seattle, the youngest of three children born to a bridge builder-contractor and his wife.

"During the 1930s and 1940s, her father would travel from British Columbia to Alaska to job sites and take his family with him. They would live in tents on the construction sites," Copeland said.

During her last semester at the University of Washington, Mrs. Gwathmey, an avid skiier and competitive swimmer on Puget Sound, left school "because she wanted to make her mark on the Korean War," her daughter said.

For two years she served as a stewardess on nonpressurized propeller aircraft that ferried U.S. troops bound to and from the Korean War. "The stewardesses had to prepare the meals in flight -- they made them [from scratch] in big pots, put them on trays and served them," Copeland said.

After the war, she married Owen Gwathmey, a surgeon whom she had met on a blind date.

In the mid-1960s, the couple moved to Aylett, where her husband had grown up. She loved Aylett but felt its opportunities for education could be better.

"It was mother's vision to start Aylett Country Day School. She was the driving force behind it, the silent one pushing it all along. The school started off in an old closed-down hotel in Walkerton," Copeland said. Her husband guaranteed the teachers' salaries.

Using a curriculum modeled after that of Collegiate School in Henrico County, they opened in 1966 with about 30 students in grades kindergarten to sixth grade. The school, now in Essex County, serves more than 200 students from age 3 through eighth grade. A board room is named in her honor. Mrs. Gwathmey's children and grandchildren have continued her legacy at the school, Copeland said.

Later, Mrs. Gwathmey was a Realtor for 15 years, retiring when she was about 60, Copeland said.

Although she had lived in Virginia more than 50 years and loved it, "she wanted people to know she was a westerner," Copeland said. "She said, 'I want it to say on my tombstone that I was a westerner.'"

Her husband of 47 years died in 2001.

Survivors include a son, John Owen Gwathmey of Aylett; two more daughters, Sarah Vogt and Henrietta Beightol, both of Richmond; and 11 grandchildren.