Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

and different things.” It wasn’t so much style we disagreed about, it was practicality. I
remember she was so excited one day. We were in the drawing room and she had some
sample fabrics for the drapes, which the state was paying for, as well as (samples of) the
tassels that went on it. And she was very excited because she finally found what she had
been looking for, and she spent a lot of time looking for these things. Dan came home,
probably for lunch. She was starting to tell him about the drapes, and he was just aghast
at the cost. I had not been discussing it with him because I knew he would blow a stack.
He asked, “So how much is one of those tassels, Jean?” And she told him. I forget the cost.
And he said, “And how many are you going to use?” I could see the wheels turning in his
head, “And that’s X thousands of dollars.” Then he said, “We can’t do that, Jean!” Well, we
worked it out.
Hughes: Sticker shock.
Evans: Yes, oh, big time. … Then eventually we did our bedroom as well, and that was a very
pleasant change. But then the public rooms in the Governor’s Mansion just needed a lot of
work. … There was this dark green wall-to-wall carpet as you walked in that went all the way
to the ballroom and up the stairs with the thread showing on the risers. Then hanging on
the doors that went into the ballroom were these very, very faded pink silk drapes.
Hughes: How ghastly.
Evans: They were ghastly. And then in the ballroom on each of the doors and the windows
were the same things. Over the Palladian window at the end of the ballroom there was
this heavy pink brocade cover. It was all done in the 1930s. And there was all this fringe.
Hughes: Who knows how much dust was in all that stuff.
Evans: Exactly. It was dirty. And then there was the State Dining Room. There was no
place to eat other than the State Dining Room, other than a little butler’s pantry that was
off the kitchen where there was a round little white table that had been painted many
times. There were three chairs in there because four wouldn’t fit. That’s where we ate
breakfast. Family dinners were in the big State Dining Room, which is a very large, formal
dining room. And so there were a lot of things that needed attention. And we needed a
more comfortable living room. That’s when Dan first talked about an architect — Ibsen
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