Evans Politics

Contact Paul Evans
Home Phone

330-264-8692

Contact Paul by Email

Eleanor K. Evans

born October 4, 1925, died February 8, 2007

First off, I want to humbly apologize to my family for how terribly wrong I used to have this web page. Yes, that’s me in the picture next to the Contact Info, with my mom, in 1961, when I was four. My mother remains the finest, most pure, best person I have ever met in my life. I now have, I want to say, a very strong faith in Jesus and God, yet I found myself such difficulty…. I have been the caregiver for my father for years and yet at one point, the low point, definitely, I finally just drove away, with very little money, no friends to take me in, and basically nowhere to go. I am certain my sanity was doubted due to a history of mental illness. I assure you, I am quite sane. Finally a very fine lady friend took me in and comforted me. Thank you so much, Candy.

And then God fixed it. Really, it took years before I fully realized just how depressed, but wonderful and incredibly loving and kind, my Dad Jack is, and how much he needs God’s love in his life, as he has never been any kind of believer. If only he knew just how much he is loved! My father is “the best”!

It took the special, amazing love of a special lady named Shannon, but, finally, I saw my way through my difficulties. Also, I finally found out (realized) I am a bit of an insomniac; shouda known: duh! (over the counter, herbal sleep medications do the job nicely when I want). And I was on the wrong medicine for quite a while. Really, I don’t expect many more horrible problems. (Heck, I’ve been wrong before…. — what’s the Las Vegas line???)

I cannot say in anything like words how wonderful Mom was, how much she worked and suffered 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. You may only begin to have some idea how much. Eleanor Krieger Evans 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 wonderful 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. Her father, with whom we lived eight years of my childhood, 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 seemed to me an honor, a joy, and an incredible wonder to have known him. 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 partial insanity, and her life in a Virginia mental institution… God, what horror! And yet the fact is, Grand was a nice, loving and wonderful man…. and yet… such horrible delusional insanity.

My sister, Katharine K. Evans, 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 well at all, was isolated except for her mother and me, angry and upset about her life, and she reacted by mistreating her mother somewhat. Yet we all loved Katherine very much, and were very dedicated to her happiness. She never understood life, yet she tried so hard, and my mother just cared for her, 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. It was that kind of terrible tragedy.

My mother and my father — and I must say BOTH, although in many ways particularly my mother, gave me any specialness which I may perhaps be lucky enough to possess. My mother and my father have lived lives far more incredible than anyone could imagine! Regardless of what anyone thinks.

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, where Dad lived three years of his childhood. Skipper finished his Marine career in charge of the Headquarters Batallion 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!

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, where we lived from 1961 to almost/about 1964. 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 decent time in my family’s history. Let me add that Jack has a master’s degree in Russian history from Georgetown. I think we went in about 1964 to the New Haven, Connecticut area where Dad became a doctoral student at Yale University.

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 was a lot of fun, and our time there was good and right for our family. 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.

Then Dad had received a job at Florida State teacher’s college in Tallahassee, Florida, but had a dispute with one professor, and left for a new job, rather than fight him. 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. Although he could have stayed, it was a matter of principle with him, and he resigned. Since then his family has been about his only true friend in the world…. and how unfair is that? Well at least, we could use a few more visitors around here!

He became a little depressed about his lack of professional success, but never showed it, until his beloved wife of 60 years marriage died in 2007, after which he was a lot more down for a while, yet now he’s doing fine.

In 1985 we had moved out to an isolated house above the village of Overton, 5 miles NNW of Wooster. 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. It hurt me to live there my sister, who was not 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! Now, since perhaps 2002 or 2004, Dad just sat attentively in his favorite chair, and watched television. I swear, he still has ten times the mind I have, really, even at his age.

Referring again to my mother’s mother, Louise Krieger, she was a wonderful musician and very Christian lady in her youth, and she went to college at Wartburg (Lutheran) College in Iowa, where she met my grandfather, Herbert, who at first had a dual religion and music major, but then became a very successful anthropologist. Well, Louise, his wife, went insane from mania when my mother was eight. She never was released from her treatment, remaining in Virginia State mental institutions until eight years before her death, when she went to decline and die at a state psychiatric nursing facility. She was a very pious, devout Christian, as described to me, and I never quite understood why this made her untreatably insane. She was described to me as harmlessly, piously Christian and ministering to the other mental patients, in her otherworldly way. They must have tried everything; I know from personal experience at these institutions that they DO do everything imaginable to cure a patient. My parents never once during her life allowed me to visit her; I never met Louise, my grandmother, my mother’s mother. .

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 complete jerk in college but got by somehow, anyway. Mom and Dad had taught me all the right lessons, but I didn’t learn them very well, 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. However my life had begun to go rather horribly wrong. I went through a very 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.

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 his logic. Sort of. His logical abilities are quite superior to mine, even recently.

I believe, in fact, that my insomnia was fully the source of my FORMER mental illness. Then I threw myself on the Christian resources of this wonderful – I realize – town of Wooster. You have to realize, from the beginning, that I KNEW I was insane at times and quite delusional. I WAS THERE. I experienced it, fully “there”, experiencing it fully rationally, and it was sheer hell, especially having people relate to me as insane and not a decent, intelligent person. Well I am now NOT insane, I have NO delusions, I have ESCAPED it and come into full sanity and the understanding of our Lord’s love. Only His love could have saved me. And society came through for me. Despite what you may think, all this left me with really no scars, though that might seem imposssible (it is not), it just made me pretty tough. Yet I am an intensely caring person, and “family values” with a very strong appreciation of “everyman” and also the ladies might be how I would describe myself. I am a loving man, not a fighter or at all bitter.

In the late nineties and early 2000’s I went through a rather bad and unproductive period, and actually rather meaningless in some ways, you would think. The main thing is, I was constantly at this time reading, and thinking, and learning, despite everything. I own perhaps 19,000 books, and have read many of Dads, until 2004 on (when I received my sister’s computer after she died), it has been computers which fascinated me, 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”.) Later in 2008 I edited and helped to write a book on Spiritualist Christianity called “If You Plant Roses You Don’t Get Carnations: An Introduction to Spiritualism”. The author, Cindy Christman, was my girlfriend for about two years and I am very grateful to her. I hope she understands that.

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 beginning of 2009, I was a Unitarian-Universalist. Visit the Trinity UCC website here. I also recently found 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.

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 Serivce 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

*****

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. One could simply be a persona still searching for a personal religious belief. Universalists are usually thought of as more Scripturally 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. The symbol, 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.  A suggestion would be to type “Principles” into the search bar and load the first result. I have been a member since 1984, but began attending Trinity United Church of Christ at the beginning of 2009, and have become a member there. The Unitarians are a worldwide faith. The church and logo is in no way affiliated with my business. The fellowship in Wooster can be found at www.uufwc.org. They meet Sundays at 9:00 and 10:45 a.m.

By the way, I’ve been scammed a few times, am actually pretty tough…. give it up. You’ll NEVER meet a more loving man, though, but don’t even think about it.

Here is a sincere warning to those with evil in their heart. Read the document; you aren’t fooling anyone. I’m pretty well known. Please just go away or you’ll be exposed.

My passion and my hope for the future have been to meet some fine, sexy “family values” lady who might understand someone who is smart and different, and Evans Politics. And then I met Shannon. Now her dreams are my dreams.