Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

a trundle underneath, so three bunks on each side and then maybe four feet in between
them. So we all sat on the floor because that was the only place that we could sit for dinner.
We put down towels and sat around. We knew them by now, but we weren’t part of the
bridge club, and didn’t even know much about the bridge club. It was after that, I think,
that the bridge club people who didn’t know us were just seeing if they liked us. It was like
rush at sorority. Before long they asked us if we would like to join. And we said, “Yes, we
would love to” because we loved to play bridge. There ended up being 12 us who would
get together once a month at everybody’s home. We would rotate around. … We were all
good friends. And you’d draw for partners. You never knew that evening who your partner
was going to be – your husband, or another woman, or a man. Then we would total up the
score at the end of the evening. And then we’d have dessert and coffee and go home.
It got so that some of the same people were always winning and some of the same
people were always losing. Then on the fifth month the losers would give a dinner for us
all. Every time we came to play bridge we would bring five dollars. Bill Gates had a sock
that he would bring and the money would go into that sock. The losers would take that
money and have dinner for the rest of us, the other 10 people. So it was a lot of fun. We
really became very, very, very good friends, all of us.
Hughes: It’s really easy to see that with Bill Gates Sr. He put me at ease instantly and we
were meeting for the first time.
Evans: Oh yeah. He’s a lovely, lovely person. He truly is. At any rate, I need to finish this
story that I started. … It’s just been in the last two years that some of our members have
died. Mary Gates died, and then when Mimi married Bill we always had an extra because
she doesn’t play bridge. But it always worked out because some would be traveling. And
we didn’t do the five dollars anymore because it would hardly cover the wine. So we just
did the dinners and we tried to do different things. We had some that were just absolute
classics. One that everybody remembers was a treasure hunt in downtown Seattle. It was
absolutely wonderful. Bill Gates and Barbara Frederick, who is one of my dear friends, put
it on because they were the losers.
But we got these same people losing and winning so we finally went to a handicap
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