Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

ig award for her senior thesis, or whatever they called it, in high school. After college, she
went back down to Florida to live with her parents and to teach. We have some books
that she taught with, and her notes on the teaching of nutrition – classic stuff. Mother
was a really good cook. She had a very good friend, Betty, who would come to visit at
our house. We all loved her. She was a nutritionist, too, and ended up going to China to
improve nutrition in the 1930s and ’40s. But when Betty would come to visit, she would
help mother with the cooking. I remember that her vegetables were always mushy and
overdone, while mother always liked them sort of crisp, you know, like we all do now.
So she was ahead of her time. She was a good cook, a sensible cook. But she also had a
wonderful ability: At every meal there was presentation in everything. It was not fussy; it
was not pretentious, but there was always her special touch. She presented things nicely,
just as a matter of form, for her husband and four children.
Hughes: And did her four children appreciate that at the time?
Evans: Well, we did. I always remember that we did. Unless the kids were gone
someplace or off doing things, we all sat down to dinner at the dining room table every
night. And when dinner was through, my father would say, “Never a finer meal was served
by a fairer hand.”
Hughes: I love your dad!
Evans: Yes. Daddy was wonderful.
Hughes: Did he go by “Bill”?
Evans: Well, his old friends called him Bill, but my mother and the newer friends all called
him Lawrence. His middle name. That’s what his parents had called him because his father
was also William.
Hughes: What was it like growing up in the Bell household in Spokane in the 1930s? Was it
a busy, rambunctious kind of place?
Evans: Yes. Especially when I was really young. My brother Bill was about 9 years older
than I. My sister Mary was seven years older – a month younger than Dan, in fact. My sister
Barbara was 12 years older. So my nearest sibling was seven years older.
Hughes: You must have been doted on.
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