Memories of Beatrice C. and David W. Evans, by Edmund C. Evans

Some Memories of Beatrice C. and David W. Evans

By Edmund C. Evans

Presented at the Evans Biography Award dinner

                There is a certain degree of risk in asking a fond son to make public statements about his parents.   Remember, you wordsmiths, that fond not only means, “loving; affectionate and tender” but it also may mean, “foolish, silly, simple and weak.”   There certainly is nothing to prevent a person from being both simultaneously. 

                I am grateful to be asked to share some of my memories and feelings about the two people whose enthusiasm for history, appreciation for excellence in writing, and love for their Western American heritage and Mormon religion made this award possible.   I might also note that they represent the economic extremes of writing.  Mother’s books were entirely a labor of love from which she never earned a farthing and Father wrote for money for nearly 70 years. 

                Mother was the oldest of 11 children.  Her father John M. Cannon was one of the small group of Mormon youth who were sent “back East” to get educated.  He received a Law degree from the University of Michigan, returned to Utah and had a very lucrative law practice, put a great deal of his wealth into the sheep business with his brothers-in-law, the Bennion boys.  He died at 52 and his family lost almost everything in the post World War I crash of the livestock market.  Her mother Zina Bennion (sister of Milton Bennion, noted educator and teacher of teachers) read and studied as voraciously as a widowed mother of 11 could do.  Her habits of using her free time to read no doubt influenced my mother’s habits of reading and preserving history. 

                My mother was an excellent student who received awards and scholarship in her early education but was denied collegiate studies by a period of severe health problems in her late teens and early twenties.  She loved to read and teach and at a very young age was a member of the General Board of the LDS Primary Association which allowed her to travel throughout the state in the company of LDS Church leaders giving speeches and instruction to women many years her senior. 

                She mothered her five sons, taught us to love learning, and filled us with stories of the history of our own families, our country and of the Manx, Welsh, English and Scottish ancestry she loved so much. 

                I can never remember when mother was not passionately involved in family history.  She was the family historian for both the Cannon and Bennion families and wrote, edited or contributed to several books of family history and wrote countless historical sketches for the family news letters that she generated for at least 50 years. 

                She had an unusual and poorly understood eye condition that made reading very difficult.  (Her eyes created unequal sized images whose conflict gave her severe headaches and painful eye strain.)   She learned to write with her eyes shut using a ribbed backing behind the paper so she could conserve her limited eye strength for reading.  She was considered visually impaired enough to be eligible for the Federally funded “Talking Books for the Blind” and she read the classics while many other women were listening to the original radio “soap operas” …Ma Perkins, Portia Faces Life, and Our Gal Sunday.” 

                How often she t old me, as I was frittering away my time reading “trash”, that story of Guttenberg’s terrible anxiety that his invention of moveable type would release a scourge of wicked, wasteful writing on the world.  He and she were both correct in their concern. 

                Father was in the middle of a family of 9 children whose ancestors included musicians, poets, diarists, and whose father, until his untimely death in a streetcar accident, was manager of the Deseret News.  None of these progenitors ever attended college.  Father was the first.  He worked and studies his way through a four year course at the University of Utah in three years, spent some time as a newspaper writer but quickly gravitated into the advertising and public relations world where he worked for others until he was nearly a50.  He then started his own advertising and public relations firm “on a shoestring”.  This has grown into one of the nation’s large firms with offices in many cities.

                How many pages of writing he did in his life is unknowable.  His goal in writing was to change other people’s behavior.  This was sometimes direct advertising telling the housewife why she should use beet sugar or turkeys.  Sometimes it was telling politicians and the general public why the waters of the Colorado River should be used carefully…and why the Upper Basin States  must band together to preserve their rights under the Colorado River Compact.  Sometimes it was to further the political causes that he championed…never as a candidate but frequently as a “King Maker.”  Sometimes it was as a devout believer in his religion in preparing a series of cards for the young people of his church entreating them to “Be Honest with Yourselves”….He gave them sound, attractive reasons for good behavior, illustrated professionally by his staff artists.  Sometimes it was as a grateful, believing advocate of higher education.  He could easily write glowingly of his Alma Mater, the U. of U, serve enthusiastically on the board at USU, and teach courses in public relations at BYU.  I don’t think he ever could cheer for any other team than Utah in athletics. 

                Father saved thousands of letters, clippings, articles and quotes about the things that had touched his life.  For the last two decades until his accidental death at 88 he hurried home from his work at the office and went to his room where he joyed in writing hundreds of pages of his own life history using the documents he had saved.  It is my guess that it was t his experience that focused him on the idea that there was so much history and biography that needed to be saved.  The idea that some of his resources could be given to stimulate others to work at biography gave him great joy.  He wanted to give real recognition to the most excellent writers.   However it was as important to him that the less polished writers would be stimulated to tell the stories that they knew.  He was just as happy about the poorly organized, badly constructed, ungrammatical efforts of the novice as he was about the polished work of the pro.  His dream, which he shared with mother and the rest of us, was that many many people would be stimulated to preserve the stories of work, faith, drama and humor that fill our lives and enrich others in the telling.