Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Hughes: Did you learn anything about your husband by watching him on the campaign
trail –something that you hadn’t seen before? Did you see him evolve?
Evans: I did, absolutely. And you asked if we discuss issues. Well, we do in a family sort of
way. But I really saw him grow with his understanding of issues in a broader sense. Being
around the state so much more and talking to so many more people, getting different sides
to every issue. I think he had a wonderful understanding of the major issues for our state,
and he learned how to articulate them in front of people.
Hughes: As a reporter in that era, it really seemed to me that Dan and his brain trust of
bright young people started to look more closely at social services issues when they got in
power, and that they started growing too.
Evans: Absolutely.
Hughes: Environmental issues.
Evans: Absolutely. Environmentalism came very easily to Dan because of his old Boy Scout
days. Ever since he was a kid at Camp Parsons he had been hiking in the Olympics. To this
day he takes a hike every summer in the Olympics or the Cascades.
Hughes: Do you do that too?
Evans: Well, I did for many years, but I don’t now because I have a foot issue. But he does
still. He did last summer. So the environment was and is very important to him. But it was
never defined in those days as the “environment” and “ecology,” and all those words that
we are so accustomed to today. So when that whole movement came along he was at the
forefront because he felt so strongly about it. That was a given.
Hughes: Justice Utter recalls with horror casually dumping garbage off the back of his
sailboat in the 1960s.
Evans: It’s terrible what we used to do.
Hughes: In the Time magazine article about Dan in ’68, “Gummie” Johnson, the Republican
strategist, is calling Dan “Old Gluefoot” because he wasn’t good at mixing with crowds.
That they’d find Dan off with a couple of people and you’d be off really schmoozing.
Evans: That’s what he’d do. He’d just go in the corner with a few people. He was enjoying
the conversation and couldn’t understand why he had to break away.
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