Archive - November 4, 2016

A few years ago I picked up the Friday, March 29, 2013, issue of The Wall Street Journal and glancing through what they call their Mansion Section the name Nan Tucker McEvoy popped out. My god, I thought, Nan is still alive! Alive and well and at 93 she was running with her only child, age 60, a 550 area olive farm 8 miles from downtown Petaluma in Northern California. The WSJ wrote, “Ms. McEvoy is the granddaughter of Michael de Young, who in 1865 co-founded the newspaper that would become the San Francisco Chronicle. After living in Washington, D.C. for many years, Ms. McEvoy served as chairmen of the board of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1981 to 1995.” Okay, lets go back to Nan’s Washington years. This is when Nan worked for Shriver at the Peace Corps.  Shriver hired her, as he hired everyone that first year, to be the deputy director of the African Regional Office. By . . .

As we know the agency attracted to Washington the ‘best and the brightest,’ all of them wanting to work in the Kennedy Administration, with the majority wanting to work at the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps also attracted Republicans and one of them was Richard (Dick) Graham from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who worked with Bill Moyers as the Deputy Associate Director for Public Affairs. Dick Graham was one of the nicest guys to work at the Peace Corps, a selfless self-made millionaire in the days when being a millionaire meant real money. Dick had his Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree from Cornell University, graduating in 1942 and going directly into the army. During the war, he was in Andimesk in the Zagros Mountains of Iran constructing roads, buildings, and installed power and water systems. Coming home, he joined his father’s firm, then struck out on his own and started an electronics . . .