Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Evans: Yes. My father’s mother was a Quaker. Although my Grandfather Bell was very
active in the Presbyterian Church, there were Quakers in the family – a lot of them.
Hughes: It was a pretty gutsy thing for your father to leave home and all that family and
come West to a fledgling university.
Evans: Oh, yes. They all thought he was lost. But when my mother and father got married
in 1918, they moved back to Bradford, Pennsylvania. My sisters, Barbara and Mary, and my
brother, Bill Jr., were all born in Bradford. But my father really wanted to get into mining
engineering, which was what he’d studied at Stanford, and much of mining was in the
West. I don’t know exactly how this worked, but he came out to British Columbia, then
went back and got my mother and the children. They were quite young when he brought
them all out to British Columbia. (Barbara Bell was born in 1920, William L. Bell Jr. in 1924,
and Mary in 1925.) That’s where the mines were, and my mother said, “We’re going to be
lost to the East.” That was the way she worded it when she told the story. … “We’ll never
come back, and it will never be the same.” She didn’t want to leave. And then years later
she’d say, “Thank goodness we left. Thank goodness we came West.” They lived up into
the wilds at Squam Bay, which is north of Vancouver. I always heard wonderful stories
about Hong, who was their Chinese cook. Eventually they moved to Vancouver, and then
to Spokane in 1931, where I was born two years later. He traveled to work on mining
ventures, but Spokane was home. Daddy first came to Spokane as a bachelor in 1908 after
his two years in Peru. He traveled widely to work.
Hughes: What kind of education did your mother have?
Evans: Well, she was a minister’s daughter. Her older brother was a Methodist minister as
well. I’m not quite sure how this happened, but while he was in school and a new pastor,
she would live with him and his wife and go to school herself. So I know that she had a
year at the University of Chicago. And she had a year at Purdue because that’s where her
brother was living at the time. I think she had another year of college, too, but I don’t
know where that was. It could have been in Florida. In any case, she became a teacher
and a nutritionist. She taught nutrition for the schools, and she did very well because she
was bright and determined. We have some of her school papers, and I know she got the
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