Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Evans: That’s right. And lost. But we were really underdogs. And it was a long campaign.
Dan and Vic Gray had just formed their new engineering partnership and just began to
work on that in 1960.
Hughes: Sure, we forget that Dan had to have a job that actually paid real money.
Evans: Exactly right. So they formed their partnership in the fall of ’60 or early ’61. Vic,
bless his heart, was a good guy. It was hard starting out, but they got some jobs and things
were looking good for the partnership when the campaign got really serious and Dan had
to take time away, Vic couldn’t have been more wonderful about agreeing, “Absolutely this
is what you must do. And I will carry on.”
Hughes: Even though Dan and Vic were just starting out together, the prospect of a
governor’s salary wasn’t nearly as lucrative as owning a successful civil engineering firm?
Evans: Oh, absolutely not. And in fact we had the same salary for 10 years as governor.
Thanks to Governor Rosellini, I think they raised it on the day before Dan took office to
$32,500. And it was that for 10 years. I can remember that.
Hughes: Speaking of money, campaigns today are obscenely expensive. But even
relatively speaking back then it had to be pretty expensive. Justice Utter recalls taking out
a second mortgage on their house to pay for a King County Superior Court race in 1964, the
same year Dan was elected governor.
Evans: Well, Dan has said many times – and he’ll say it in his book, and to you if you ever
do one of these on him – he always told the campaign that he would never use any of his
own money. First of all, he didn’t have any. But when he would go on campaign trips, he
would never use any of his own money. They had to raise it. And if they went broke, that
was the end of the campaign. But there was a time when they were down to literally only
hundreds left. And they made a visit to a well-known businessman in Seattle – I won’t give
a name, but maybe Dan would – who wrote a check that carried them through. It wasn’t a
huge check, but it carried them through until more money was raised. Norton Clapp, Booth
Gardner’s stepfather, who was a well-known businessman, was one of Dan’s supporters.
But there were just 10 or 12 people around the table, and Dan had a difficult time asking for
money. He still does. And I think it was Norton who stood up and said, “Look, we all know
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