Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Losing the growth in value that those houses had, all our friends had, was significant. We
actually wanted to buy a house when Dan became president of Evergreen. And once again
because Slim Rasmussen was so down on Evergreen, Dan determined it was not politically
wise to not move into the president’s house that was provided. It would have been great
to have bought a house because the value there then was so relatively low. We could have
bought one on the Sound somewhere. But, it didn’t happen. So we started house hunting.
And it’s not convenient to house hunt in Seattle from Bainbridge.
Dan had an office in Seattle, and every morning he would get up at the crack of
dawn, getting darker as the winter came on, and trudge to the garage, which was not
attached, with his umbrella and his briefcase, grumble, grumble. Drive to the ferry; look
for parking because all the places where you could reserve were full. And then you get the
ferry and you soon learn that you can’t sit wherever you want because that’s so-and-so’s
seat. And he always took the 6:50 or the 7:20. And then he would walk on the other side
to his office. It was not a really happy time. It was just hard for him.
I was doing a lot of house hunting. I kept looking and looking. I think it was just
because we were a little older. We sort of knew what we wanted, and we just weren’t
finding it. A lot of the houses we saw we liked, but you knew you had to gut the kitchen
and that would add more to the house, and all of that. We had one real estate person—I
went through a bunch of them and they would just give up on me, and I don’t blame them
a bit. But Mary Jane Brinkley was so nice, and she stuck with us. She came to me one day
and said, “Well, I’ve got a house for you to look at. I’m not sure you’re going to like the
house but it’s got the view.” We wanted a view.
So she brought us up here in Laurelhurst (on the hillside east of the UW campus).
It’s two small lots. It was a nice house but it was very small and it didn’t really take
advantage of the view. It was really more than we could afford, and we knew we were
going to tear the house down. There was no practical way to remodel it. But we had our
hearts set on a house with that view, designed the way we wanted things. So we bought
this property. Then they had this thing with jaws that came in and tore the house down. In
one day there was no house. It was just an amazing process to watch.
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