Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Evans: Yes.
Hughes: Was that often a progression there?
Evans: No, not necessarily. The board of overseers at that time was large. In fact Bob
Skotheim, who was the president then, sort of enlarged it. It got as big as 80 sometimes.
They had meetings on the campus, and I was on committees so I would come over a little
more often. He made it bigger to build goodwill, that sort of thing. But then when we
went East I resigned from the board of overseers.
Hughes: When did you get involved with the cancer support group?
Evans: Oh, that was when we came back to Seattle from D.C. in 1989.
Hughes: Did that coincide with your own bout with cancer?
Evans: No. My very dear friend, Barbara Frederick, was the ED (executive director) of an
organization here called Cancer Lifeline. And she had built it up. It started with a woman
who had breast cancer back in the days when there were very few resources and not a lot
of knowledge. She and her husband and friends sat around their kitchen table discussing
how to deal with it: Where do you do this, and how do you do that, and where do you
buy this, and what have you. And after she died her husband and friends went on with
this project. It started out as just a 24/7 free phone line where you had trained people
to answer all your questions, except medical questions, or just talk to you if you needed
somebody to talk to. It’s 3 in the morning and you’re feeling confused and vulnerable.
Someone was there to say, “I’m here to help you.” When Barbara became the executive
director it was evolving into other things. So she asked me if I would help. And I said, “Yes,
what do you want?” So we decided we would form an advisory committee, like a board,
only smaller, which I did.
Hughes: As a cancer survivor, that’s really close to my heart.
Evans: And that was in 1990, ’91.
Hughes: But we didn’t finish up with where we were in 1983. Suddenly and unexpectedly,
U.S. Senator Henry M. Jackson dies of a heart attack.
Evans: It was sad to lose Scoop, but the timing was very serendipitous, and that leads to
another story. The day before he died we had taken Mark, our middle son, up to SeaTac
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