Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

do that. I would love to do that.” I love books. But I didn’t
know anything about setting up a library. So after my first
year, I took a number of librarianship classes and other
classes. I learned how to set up a library. I ended up doing
it in two schools, actually. Another new school came along
later, so I was teaching music at two schools and being the
librarian as well. It was fun because they gave me a budget
and I got order all these books.
Hughes: So you were teaching grade-school kids to sing?
Evans: Kindergarten to sixth grade. It was fun.
Miss Bell’s faculty photo. Evans family album
Hughes: In some respects, being a seriously trained pianist,
did that seem a little bit rudimentary?
Evans: No, no, I enjoyed it. And we had an upright piano. It was a new-style school where
it was sort of an H-shape with a central core and four outside arms extending out. I’d
wheel that piano down into the rooms, and we’d have our music. Then I would wheel the
piano into another room, and so on. One day the principal asked me to give a little talk
at one of the PTA meetings. And I thought, “Oh my God, what am I going to talk about?”
In kindergarten and the early grades you have a lot of noise-maker type things, like
tambourines, cymbals and triangles. Very simple things like wood blocks. So I passed those
out at the PTA meeting. I’d been hearing parents say, “Well, I can’t sing, so I’m sure that
Johnny can’t sing at all.” So that was my lesson for the night. I said, “Don’t ever say to your
children, ‘I can’t do this, therefore you probably can’t either,’ because you don’t know that
for a fact. Give them a chance.”
Hughes: Robert Fulghum, who wrote “All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten,”
says that is the gospel truth – that children are like sponges, you don’t tell them they can’t
do something or they won’t try anything new.
Evans: Exactly. Well, at least we know that now. So I’d pass out the noisemakers and
then I’d play a little something on the piano, and it made it fun. They enjoyed that, and
I enjoyed doing that. Then about the time I met Dan, my nemesis each year was the
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