Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Evans: No, that’s the Ballroom. It’s just behind that. The other thermostat was in the
hallway on the second floor. And when the Cabinet Wives that I discussed earlier would
come over and help address all our Christmas cards — we sent out several thousand every
year – we’d all freeze. All those names and addresses were on card files, 3x5 cards. And
one of the women would organize it all. Then we would set up tables in the Ballroom.
Hughes: I like the Christmas card that shows your three boys sitting on a driftwood snag
with their legs dangling.
Dan and Nancy’s 1972 Christmas card. Grandma "Gom" thought it looked bad that the boy’s jeans were patched. But Nancy said
it showed they were real boys. The Legacy Project collection
Evans: Well, that’s one of our favorites. My mother was shocked that we would print that
picture with the holes in the knees of the jeans. That was up at Dinner Island in the San Juans.
And there were lots of logs, and it was just a picture we just happened to take one day.
Hughes: I think they look like real kids.
Evans: Well they were – they were real kids. … But we would be addressing Christmas
cards and we’d plug in the coffee pot. We had big 50-pot urns, and that would blow a fuse
and then the heat would go out, or the electricity would go out. So we would unplug the
coffee pots and go down into the basement again to change a fuse. The women would
all be sitting in their overcoats because it was so cold. We took pictures of them. Then we
would plug in the electric heaters, and that would blow the fuses again. I mean that’s the
way life was there. For the first couple years we lived there, all of us had colds – all of us
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