Evans Politics

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About Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul E. Evans.

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Phone Paul Evans:  330-202-7661

Eleanor K. Evans, my mother, Rest In Peace.

born October 4, 1925, died February 8, 2007

Yes, that’s me in the picture next to the contact information, with my mom, in 1961, when I was four. Read more about Paul Evans (and for God’s sake hire me if you wish, at the Hire Paul Evans! page.

Paul is “single” and “looking”.

My mother Eleanor remains the finest, most pure, best person I have ever met in my life. You could say, with the above picture, that I have left a candle burning for Mom. I now have, I want to say, a very strong faith in God, yet in late 2009 and early 2010 I found myself having a really hard time…. Finally, with a lot of people’s help, I saw my way through a few difficulties. Also, I finally found out (realized) I am a bit of an insomniac; shoud’ve known: duh! (over the counter, herbal sleep medications do the job nicely when I want). Typical geek, I guess, someone who finds it hard to let go of a day and go to bed. This despite the fact that I’m generally an early riser!

I cannot say in anything like words how wonderful Mom (Elearnor Krieger Evans) was, how hard she worked for her family, and how much I realize my great luck and honor to have known her and cared some little bit for her, for she was incredibly special. I was Mom’s caregiver for the year before she died, peacefully, at our home on February 8, 2007. I don’t see how we have since lived without her. I treasure the memory of my mother, Eleanor, and am grateful to her for all she did for us and just because she was a wonderful person.. She had a bachelor’s degree in botany from George Washington University and worked at several jobs. For a while, perhaps a few years, she worked as an EKG technician at Arlington Hospital (Virginia). Mostly, she was a housewife and homemaker but she worked for eleven years as a technician in veterinary pathology at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster, OH. Mom loved the land, loved flowers, and loved to travel all around this great land of ours. In fact, while I was a child, we lived for at least a year in Arlington, Virginia; Emporia, Kansas; New Haven Connecticut; and Florissant, Missouri (suburb of St. Louis), then back to Arlington, before moving to Wooster, where I went to high school, in 1971. Except for college, I’ve lived here ever since and have come to appreciate what a special town Wooster, Ohio is.

Mom’s father, with whom we lived eight years of my childhood, plus quite a few summers, was Herbert W. Krieger, a VERY special, quiet, even shy and kind man who was for many years Curator of the Smithsonian Division of Cultural Anthropology. The Register of his papers and photographs from the Smithsonian is here. It seems to me an honor, a joy, and an incredible wonder to have known him, and I have very fond memories of Grand. (He would bounce me on his knee from his favorite green Naugahyde recliner….) And he WAS very special and nice to me — I treasure his memory. His own wife, Louise, a very religious Christian, became very terribly manic and this led to her having some trouble with mental illness. The fact is, I lived eight years of my childhood with mom’s father and Grand was a nice, loving and wonderful man…. and yet, his wife had some real difficulty which was no one’s fault. I never really got to know Louise Schoelle Krieger, my mother’s mother.

My sister, Katharine K. Evans, (Russian spelling of the name), died on October 8, 2004 at the age of 52 and was – I want to emphasize this – an excellent veterinarian, to whom it was most important to do the very best her extremely capable mind could for her animal and human clients. However she could not relate to people all that well, and was somewhat alone except for her mother and me, perhaps a little upset about her life, and she really didn’t have that many friends outside of the family. Yet we all loved Katharine very much, and were very dedicated to her happiness. It seems to me that Katharine never understood life well — how to get along and be happy — yet she tried so hard, and my mother just cared for her, with my help, until she passed away after suffering badly from osteoarthritis and the strong pain medicine she had to take. Katharine, or “K” as we called her, passed away October 8, 2004, and was born August 11, 1952. She was a darned good veterinarian and life was unfair to her — it was in many ways a kind of tragedy. Yet Katherine’s life had it’s happy moments, and she really enjoyed showing her beloved dobermans in conformation and obedience, and mom and I helped her with that. I live in the house she left to her family, and I am better off for having known Katharine, who did the very best she could. People who knew her called her “Kay” of just “K”, and she helped a LOT of people with their pets, too.

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My mother and my father — and I must say BOTH, perhaps in some ways related to her innate goodness particularly my mother, but very definitely Dad, too, gave me any specialness which I may perhaps be lucky enough to possess. My dad sure turned out to be a very wonderful man, as well, and both have been far better individuals than I might ever hope to be. My mother and my father have lived lives far more incredible than anyone could imagine! I have been lucky to have had such special parents, I am well aware.

My father, Jack Earl Evans, whom I love very dearly, is shown here in a photograph from 1977, and was born February 28, 1925, the son of a career marine officer, whom we just called “Skipper”. Believe it or not, Skipper was the marine officer who chased the original guerrilla Sandino around the Nicaraguan countryside and was in charge of the Marine detachments on the American gunboats in Nationalist China on the Yangtze River, based in Shanghai, China. Because of this, Dad lived three years of his childhood in Shanghai in the early 1930′s. Jack was a marine in WWII, serving on Guam and in northern China until the fall of 1946, long after the war was officially over. Skipper finished his Marine career in charge of the Headquarters Battalion which then existed guarding Washington, D.C.. and retired to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida with his wife, Mae M. Evans. Grandma lived for many years here in Wooster late in her life and attended the local Central Christian Church and I so very highly considered her special in my life, although not as much as I should have. “Mo” was a most special, wonderful grandmother, and she died fully at peace after spending the last eight years of her life in West View Manor nursing home in Wooster, where she was very happy, so far as I could see. Dad and I used to always go over twice a week and play her dominoes, and I think sometimes the other residents were even jealous! Now I play dominoes with Dad over at West View Manor all the chances I get.

My own Dad served with the marines in WWII on Guam and in northern China until the fall of 1946 (3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment). Then he served as an intelligence officer for ASA (Army Security Agency), AFSIA (which was transitional into the CIA), NSA and the CIA, which he left in 1961, in order to be an ordinary college instructor in Russian, at Emporia State Teacher’s College in Kansas. We lived there from 1961 to almost/about 1964. Then we lived in Branford and North Branford, Connecticut, suburbs of New Haven, while Dad worked on his Ph.D. from Yale. For a time in 1967-68 we lived in Flourisant, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, where Dad taught as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. It was a fairly nice time in my family’s history. Let me add that Jack has a master’s degree in Russian history from Georgetown.

In 1971, after teaching at various colleges, he finished his doctoral degree from Yale in Russian language and literature. By the way, my three years in Connecticut were a lot of fun, and our time there was good and right for our family. Our time in St. Louis was pretty good, too. Young people reading this may not relate too well to the fact that at this time, I became aware of a new phenomenon in American society — the Beatles craze was at this time sweeping the country!

My father Jack’s dissertation was titled Structure and Style in the Drama of A.P. Chekov. It is really good work, I have read through it and it is pretty damned wonderful, and it has wrongly been neglected although I am pretty sure two successful Russian literature authorities pirated the good ideas and facts from Dad’s work. Dad DID lead a very difficult, probably wrongly unsuccessful life in terms of his career as a Russian language and literature professor, and really, it wasn’t his fault at all, not at all. I trust Dad sooo much, even at age 85, I would in fact do whatever he told me to. And I am so happy to say that Dad trusts me similarly.

Dad had received a job at Florida State teacher’s college in Tallahassee, Florida, and although that didn’t work out, we did get to live in Tallahassee for a while, which was great! I particularly remember Wakulah Springs, and also a little state park called Silver Lake and always wondered if the Jackson Brown song of that name was named after it, but I guess there are a lot of “Silver Lake’s”. He then got a job as an assistant professor at the College of Wooster, where he stayed until late 1977/1978. He then got into a dispute with then Dean Copeland, who was then becoming President of the College of Wooster. It was a matter of academic, teaching and ethical principle with Dad, and of course, although Dad won the vote on the faculty floor over the matter, Dean Copeland prevailed (and became the college President). Although he could have stayed, it was a matter of principle with him, and my father resigned the next academic year. Since then his family has been about his only true friend in the world although he is a very nice man and people like him…he is just a little reserved, or just quiet and shy. It always seemed to me that he should have far more friends in this life, to say the least. Well at least, we could use a few more visitors around here and at the nursing home!

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After his beloved wife of 60 years marriage, my mother Eleanor, died in 2007, he was a lot more “down” for a couple of years, yet now he’s doing fine, although currently he has to live in what is actually a wonderful, faith based nursing home, West View Manor here in Wooster, OH. He and I are just praying that he can come home to his comfy lift chair/recliner and HD television, plus my custom mocha Cappuccinos, and all the love I can give him.

In 1985 we had moved out to an isolated house above the village of Overton, 5 miles NNW of Wooster, on top of a glacial knob at the end of a long ridge where five families live. (We used to live in town: in the north side of Wooster, Ohio, where I went to high school.) Basically for many years Dad and I did things together, and it was not so bad, yet in some fundamental ways my own mental illness made it no fun at all. I am not ashamed of “where I was” in life for a long time. It gave me a chance to do a LOT of reading and thinking, among other things. But it hurt me to live there with my sister, who was not so very kind to me, and in that much isolation, despite my loving mother and how close my family has always been. However, mom and I had some huge vegetable gardens and I did one heck of a lot of reading! It’s a lot of work to take care of a seven acre property. And in the nineties I edited 11 books which my father translated. Now, since perhaps 2004, Dad has spent most of his time sitting attentively in his favorite chair, and watching television. He was forced by an unfortunate coincidence of both my illness and his to live for the present since the beginning of 2010 in West View Manor nursing home, about five miles away from our home. I try to visit him every day, and my fondest hope is that he might come home again to sit in his favorite chair for a few years before he passes on. I know that’s all he wants now, and it is and will be my number one priority to get him home. Dad still is a good conversationalist, too!

Now more about Paul. I led a very happy and innocent childhood, and eventually graduated in 1980 from Miami University (Oxford, OH), with a degree in geology. I also finished the coursework and passed the comprehensive exams towards a masters degree in Earth Science at The University of Akron, but failed to write my masters thesis. I was a pretty typical freshman and sophomore in college but got by somehow, anyway, and even managed to graduate from Miami University (Ohio) with a 3.44 G.P.A. Mom and Dad had taught me all the right lessons, but I didn’t learn them very well, until later in life, when I had to learn them for myself. Hindsight is 20/20. And I hadn’t “got my head together” enough until it was too late for me to realistically complete my masters degree. In point of fact, though, I had been pretty thoroughly shattered by an unhappy love affair as an undergraduate. Nobody’s fault, really. I’m not the first person in history to develop some problems in life because of a broken heart, I’m sure. However my life had begun to go somewhat wrong. I went through a difficult period suffering from mental illness, but never gave up and am now, I feel, quite well and of course desire only realistically a normal life. This has been possible primarily because of the goodness of my parents and of friends and even some official type people around Wooster, who all helped me very much. I’d also like to thank Bert Bishop, Kay Bowen, Elizabeth Sheets, Candy Lint, Dr. Nukala Reddy and Jean Brugger, because they have been “there” for me.

In the 90′s I was the translation editor for eleven books (which my father Jack translated from the Russian and Ukranian) on subjects ranging from a collection of short stories and a novel, to the effects of the consumption of major wheat components on cancer rates. It did, in a major way, you might conclude, teach me to match my Yale Ph.D. father’s logic. Sort of. His logical abilities used to be superior to mine, even up until recently. He is a wonderful, wonderful guy.

I believe, in fact, that my insomnia was partly the source of my mental illness. Although I currently have no symptoms, (although I do have problems getting enough sleep), this is like any other disease, the symptoms may fully vanish yet the threat of a relapse remains and I am careful to “self-monitor” for any sign of a problem. It seems to be coincidental with periods of insomnia and also a little (documented) dehydration just through lack of drinking enough fluids. Also I am lucky!- I realize – to live in a wonderful, Christian community. Wooster is much better off than many towns, although of course everyone has been suffering through this recession. It does not take that many people of good will to be a real help in ANY person’s life, and I was fortunate. I also want to thank my friends Bert and Kay for always having been there for me for many, many years. You have to realize, from the beginning, that I KNEW it the few times I was insane, or sometimes, rather delusional. I WAS THERE. I experienced it, fully “there”, experiencing it fully rationally, and what actually made it sheer hell for me, especially, was having people relate to me as delusional (when I was very rationally experiencing this) and not as a decent, intelligent person. Well I am now I have come out of the “bad” period of my life and come into full sanity and clarity of thought, and am no longer having any problems. I have been lucky and a lot of people have helped me.

Despite the stigma society puts on the mentally ill, the fact is, people who have problems this way should no more be ashamed of it than a person with a chronic arthritis… I mean, mental illness isn’t MY fault or anyone’s fault at all… And I am proud of having persevered through it and feel it even may have made me a better person. When you have a problem like this it can take you down or it can make you stronger… and in my case hopefully a more caring person.

And despite what you may think, all this left me with really no scars. In some ways suffering as I did had some positive benefits, as it helped me to be a caring person, and gave me the right sort of “family values” with a very strong appreciation of “everyman”. I believe my experience with mental illness also left me more gentle and thoughtful than I would be otherwise. My family represents, also, a long line of New Deal Democrats, and suffering as I did only reinforced this and made me especially take to heart Jesus’ admonition to “feed his sheep”. I guess I take that as a mandate for a caring, empathetic and loving society. Anyway it is one of the main reasons I have been a stalwart Democrat all my life. I am a loving man, not a fighter or at all bitter about the difficult times I suffered through.

See What It’s Like to Be Down and Out in America, Evans Liberal Politics, August 28, 2010, by Paul Evans.

I do tend to be a bit of a night owl… and my sleeping habits are somewhat irregular. Part of that is of necessity with the 24 hour news cycle I cover. It is a good thing for me to work at night to put up the next day’s news. Websites and blog posts don’t just happen: there is a lot of work involved. I just wish there were someone in my life who might share with me a little of what I do in working on the news blog or share in my life in any reasonable way.

In the late nineties and early 2000′s I went through a rather bad and unproductive period in some ways, yet not meaningless and not unenjoyable, either. It was however at the beginning of this time that Dad and I were finishing up our collaboration of my editing of 11 books which he translated from the Russian and Ukranian, and that did keep me busy. During the period from 2005 through 2009, I was the caregiver for first my mother and then my father as age took its toll on them and finally snatched my mother Eleanor away from us. I learned some Russian from Dad, too, to complement the German I had learned in high school and college. The main thing is, I was constantly at this time reading, and thinking, and learning. I own perhaps 19,000 books, and have read many of Dad’s, until 2004 on (when I received my sister’s computer after she died), and since then it has been computers which fascinated me, and increasingly news and politics, almost to the exclusion of books. (In 1978 as a junior in college I DID take a Fortran programming course and was on the “mainframe” at The University of Akron in about 1983 for an advanced structural geology course – got an “A”.) Of course I love music and movies, and I have a lot of facets to my personality, I’m by no means a one-dimensional guy, and I think I would describe my personality as someone who is a bit of a nerd and very much a geek, yet with a multifaceted mind which puts forth a lot of effort in life. I also believe myself to be a caring man, as you may understand comes somewhat readily to someone who has suffered a bit. Another thing I enjoy a lot is driving around northeast Ohio in my red Honda CR-V, “Old Red” of which there is a picture, below.

Later, in 2007 and early 2008 I edited and helped to write my twelfth book, which was on Spiritualist Christianity and called “If You Plant Roses You Don’t Get Carnations: An Introduction to Spiritualism” (Amazon.com book description and purchase page). The author, Cindy Christman, was my girlfriend for about two years and I am grateful to her for some nice memories. I hope she understands that. Please feel free to email me if you are an author looking for an editor, or even just to say hi.

While I have been engaged twice, I have never married and have no children. It seems as though I have had bad luck in relationships, which means my luck can only get better, LOL. Please feel encouraged to send me a hello. Right now, I have no real girlfriend and I am more looking to make a few good friends. Friends make the world go ’round.

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In late 2005, I wrote an article honoring Trafalgar, the most famous naval battle of all time, on it’s 200th anniversary. I was fortunate enough to get that article published in History magazine, as the cover piece for the Oct./Nov. 2005 issue. If you are interested in naval history, you might want to read my six page article, since it was Trafalgar which stopped Napoleon from having any hope of invading England and gave England 110 years of naval supremacy on the world’s oceans. I would be happy for you to read my article, Trafalgar: 200 Years Later. To read the article you will need Adobe Reader. Download the latest version (free) here.

© Mike Haywood
Go to Mike’s Website

The painting shows Vice-Admiral
Horatio Nelson, commander of the British fleet.

While I am currently occasionally attending Trinity United Church of Christ in Wooster, from 1984 until the end of 2008, I was a Unitarian-Universalist. Visit the Trinity UCC website here. I also recently find myself attending the Wooster Church of the Nazarene with some of my neighbors, although I do not know His plans for my future worship activities. (I’m kind of waiting to see where He sends me, in terms of what church to attend.) All three of these churches, while of course quite different from each other, have some wonderful opportunities to learn and grow spiritually. They are sort of left, center and right in terms of their Christian beliefs: U-U’s are very liberal, United Church of Christ is very Christian, yet moderate, while the Church of the Nazarene is very Bible based and a place to go if you want that direction in your life. It also matters in terms of how you feel about certain Christian beliefs, such as one’s beliefs about the Book of Revelations, and whether you feel these are the end times. Since I became truly saved, or at least renewed an earlier dedication to serving God, at the beginning of June, 2010, I do feel that humanity is approaching a crisis which will have no resolution excerpt by God’s intervention. At the same time I believe strongly in working to make the world a better place. I feel that as Christians we can do no less. I also do not think a loving God would destroy the world in order to save some of its people, as it says in the book of Revelation.

Trinity United Church of Christ
Wooster, Ohio

The Pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ (Trinity UCC)
is Rev. Dr. Kevan Franklin, whose friendship means so very much to me.

*****

Come join the United Church of Christ, if you wish, on Sunday mornings.  We have an Alternative (contemporary) service at 8:30 a.m. in the Fellowship Hall and a Classic Service at 10:30 a.m. in the Sanctuary, with Christian Education for all ages at 9:15 a.m.

Trinity United Church of Christ
150 E. North St.
Wooster, Ohio 44691

330-264-9250

Email Trinity UCC

*****

My Experience
with the Unitarian-Universalist Faith

At the left is a symbol of the Unitarian-Universalist Association. They are a church which believes in the search for truth and gives their members complete freedom to believe as they are led by their consciences. One could be a liberal Christian, or study Zen Buddhism or Taoism, or be simply an environmentalist, or even be a humanist, agnostic, atheist or study pagan religions. While one can be a Christian and be a “U-U,” generally Unitarian-Universalists believe that most or all religions are reflections of the same truth and that no religion should be viewed as “better” than any other. My own conviction as a Christian, which took place in a troubled manner, but is wholly heartfelt and real for me, caused me to believe that there is more truth in Christianity per se than in other religions, at least for me. At this point, the very beginning of 2009, I left the local U-U church, began attending Trinity United Church of Christ, and soon became a member. At the same time, I see a lot of truth, beauty and opportunity to learn from all world religions, yet Christianity is The Truth for me now. Yet by no means have I ceased being fascinated by all world religions, which in my opinion all have something to teach us.

In the Unitarian-Universalist faith, one could simply be a persona still searching for a personal religious belief. Belief in a particular religion is not required to join, and quite a few members are either searchers or do not particularly believe in anything except their own moral and ethical values, while at the same time holding a reverence for the goodness within the Universe. Also, Pagans, Wiccans and other witches may find a home in this church. Yet I insist, any decent belief is fostered and supported here, and one can attend this church and be a liberal Christian. Universalists (quite a few Unitarian-Universalists consider themeselves to be primarily Universalist, and many of our churches still label themselves as such) are usually thought of as more Scripturaly based Christians who believe that all souls are saved, that a loving God would not damn anyone. The two formerly separate groups merged in 1961. And yes, some U-U’s are in fact Republican. The symbol shown above, which is actually the OLD logo, is called the Flaming Chalice. It originated sometime during or just after World War II when the Unitarian church was assisting Jewish people to escape the clutches of the Nazis in Europe, operating primarily, I think, out of Spain. You can explore U-U beliefs at the website of The Unitarian-Universalist Association of Congregations. You can read the U-U Principles in a Word document here. The church and logo is in no way affiliated with my business. The fellowship in Wooster can be found at www.uufwc.org. The local U-U fellowship meets Sundays at 9:00 and 10:45 a.m. (There is more on Trinity United Church of Christ, the most usual church I go to, and the one I am a member of, above.)

While now I am a strong Christian, I do not believe in the strict and universal literality of the truth of all passages in the Bible. It is a document written down by men, and the wonderful spiritual inspiration which caused it to be written down is no less flawed than were the very flawed and human men who first wrote it down. One should also keep in mind, as to the Old Testament, that this was handed down orally for some 800 years, scholars believe, before it was ever written down. I really think that quite a bit of the Old Testament is more about the customs of the ancient Hebrew people than it is a reflection of the Word of God. Certainly I feel that way about certain passages of the Old Testament. The literal truth of the New Testament seems less questionable to me, and yet I realize at the same time that it is by our own fallible human minds that various translations of the Bible in fact become available, that in fact different translations have some different content, and also that no person gets any meaning from the Bible except through the interpretations of a flawed and very human mind. The Book of Revelation particularly within the New Testament is, besides being controversial, is the least credible to me of New Testament books as to it’s literal truth. I find it an allegorical work and one that is very useful to growth and development, yet somehow I question it’s literal truth in that I have a hard time believing that God, in his totally loving nature, would subject mankind to that sort of ordeal. Did he not promise, in the Old Testament (if you believe in the literal truth of the Bible), never to again destroy the world? Revelation has always troubled me, and I believe that thinking it literally true has caused a great deal of trouble in the world, as it inspires neocons (right wing militaristic Republicans) to work towards it’s fulfillment, which I find rather evil. Call me a very faithful and spiritual Christian liberal.

So far as Bible scholars can tell, the Gospel of Matthew was the earliest of the four Gospels, written about 50 A.D. Matthew and Mark followed in about 70 A.D. and John is believed to have been written perhaps about 90 A.D. Some liberal Christian theologians have commented that John is the only Gospel which affirms that Jesus is really God, and remark that the earlier church did not claim such a thing. Whether or not you may believe that Jesus is God, such a passage as Matthew 17: 1-13 surely seems to affirm that Jesus is God’s Son, and not simply a prophet, and that this belief infused the earliest Christian church’s writings. In fact, the early Church existed as a sect within Judaism, and it was not, scholars believe, until about 170 A.D. that this faith actually called itself “Christian,” as distinct from Judaism. (You do realize, Jesus was a Jew, right?) The nature of the passage (Matthew 17:) is such as to make the fact that the early church believed in the divinity of Jesus clearly apparent.