Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

first of January. Then after some looking we finally bought a house, which we loved. It was
a little 20-foot-wide house that was built in 1878. It had three stories and a garage and
a basement. It was quite big by Hill standards. We were on the Hill, two blocks from the
Supreme Court
After living in the Governor’s Mansion, and even at the Evergreen president’s house
with a view of Mt. Rainier and all, it was a change. But it was a very interesting place – very
up and down, very vertical. The ceiling in our bedroom and in the living room was the
old tin – embossed tin squares. And the crown moldings all around were all the original.
Fortunately, it had been updated with new wiring and plumbing. We gutted the kitchen,
and gutted our bathroom. There was not much closet space anywhere. I looked at houses
that had never had closets when they were built.
Hughes: People wonder today why everyone in that era had those big wardrobe cabinets.
They were closets.
Evans: Exactly. A lot of those are back there. But in the meantime, we had to find
someplace to live temporarily, which was not easy. But we had some wonderful friends.
(Washington Congressman) Sid Morrison was one, and early in January we stayed at his
condo because he wasn’t there an awful lot. It was a big condo, with several bedrooms. So
that was just wonderful. And the boys came and could stay there when Dan was sworn in.
Hughes: Was Joel Pritchard, your old friend, in Congress then?
Evans: Yes, he still was. (Editor’s Note: Pritchard left Congress in 1985.) And he was also a
very good friend of my brother’s. Joel was a very close friend of ours.
I finally found a condo that would rent. It’s hard to rent a place for just a month or
two. And then I had to furnish it. I remember going down to one of these rental places.
They had several of them in D.C. I went to a couple of them and figured out which one had
the best quality. Everything of ours was in storage because we had no place to move it to.
So I picked out a sofa, two end tables, and a coffee table, two lamps, two chairs, a king-size
bed with two end tables, and two lamps, and two dressers, and a twin bed for the other
bedroom in case a child came to visit. And I had packed four plates, four bowls, a coffee
pot – I mean just the basics – and a few glasses and mugs.
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