Morton D’Evelyn made Eagle Scout, excelled at Stanford, fought in the South Pacific, then was an independent oilman and California conservative activist in the early days of Goldwater and Reagan. The issues and ideas he championed at mid-century are with us today more urgently than ever. I mean such ideas as:
Limited constitutional government as the bulwark of our liberties. Energy as the lifeblood of America's economic miracle. Environmental extremism as a false religion. Education as cultural oxygen. Biblical truth as the bedrock of the Republic. Those were Mort’s guiding lights.
Lt. Morton D’Evelyn (r) in New Guinea, 1944
A charter member of the Greatest Generation, a man among men, he devoted his too-short life to what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.” Being blessed in having married his daughter, Donna, I learned priceless lessons from Mort D’Evelyn.
So can you, in my new book about his legacy, Mort: A Memoir. It’s a bracing journey back in time. The opening chapter starts this way:
The Dinner
It was a July evening in 1965, at a table for four in a little steakhouse in a Colorado mountain town.The oilman sat silent while his wife and daughter chatted happily after a month apart. The college boy fumbled with some crackers and wracked his brain for a way to join the conversation.
The minutes dragged. This was the young guy’s first time to meet his girlfriend’s father, formidable with bushy brows, chiseled profile, quiet reserve. At last the older man spoke—but with an engineer’s pithy questions that left the kid at a loss:
“How often does the produce truck deliver up there at your dad’s camp? Who’s the propane jobber here in the valley? What year did REA service reach the campground?”
Blushing, the callow youth (me) stammered out lame answers. Could I really have drifted along so abysmally ignorant of the practicalities of the family business? Was this placid inquisitor someone I could ever relax with? It was going to be a long dinner.
The Californian
Such was my introduction to Morton D’Evelyn of Hillsborough, California, who had come with his wife Patty to visit their daughter Donna, 21, at Round-Up Ranch for Girls in Buena Vista, Colorado, where she was a counselor.
My parents, John and Marianne Andrews, had started Round-Up several years before as a sister camp to their Sky Valley Ranch for Boys, where I had been a regular since 1955, eleven summers.
Donna and I had been dating off and on for over a year now, and things were starting to get serious. I had met her mother—and grandmother and great aunt, the three of them in their feminine way equally as formidable as her father—the previous spring at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, where we were classmates.
But until that evening at Tising’s Stagecoach Inn, I had not met her dad. It began an acquaintance that would last not quite a decade, warming from my initial, nervous awe into a respectful if never intimate rapport—and growing into boundless admiration for the flinty California patriarch and patriot.
It’s my admiration and gratitude, deepening as age has taught me more about people and life, that now inspire this personal portrait of my father-in-law, a man among men, Morton Naylor D’Evelyn, 1915-1974.
The Conservative
That autumn of 1965 began senior year for Donna and me. Never had I had a friend of either sex who so resonated with my passion for all things political, from the student honor code on campus to Lyndon Johnson in the White House. She “got” me as no one ever had, and it became apparent that her father was part of the reason.
Mort—as I never in my life called him or dreamt of calling him, but will call him here—had imbibed a zest for conservatism from his father and grandfathers, honed it in campus politics at Stanford, and passed it along to Donna, to her younger brothers Tom and Dave, and eventually to baby sister Sally.
So it had actually been Donna who tugged me into the Goldwater camp only a week before the 1964 election; my moderate Republican upbringing recoiled from the fiery Arizonan until love prevailed.
Mort D’Evelyn with Ronald Reagan, 1964
As a houseguest in the D’Evelyn home over Christmas break in 1965, I took note of Mort’s fireside reading table with its stacks of Human Events andNational Review magazines, saw the bookshelves lined with Mises, Hayek, Weaver, and The Christian History of the Constitution, and heard about the Americanism classes he and Patty had organized in their living room for students from Donna’s high school.
This second encounter with my future father-in-law also began to acquaint me with other facets of his still-waters-run-deep personality. They ranged from the affectionate twinkle in his eye when interacting with both the daughters he doted on—to the wordless authority he could project with a single glance at either of his sons, Tom the intense intellectual and Eagle Scout, and Dave the impish tease and Fillmore music aficionado—to the way Mort’s taciturn Gibraltar of reliability balanced Patty’s bubbling vivacity.
The Gentleman
Was I on trial with Mort at this stage of my courtship with Donna, the adored wartime firstborn he hadn’t seen until she was 18 months old, named in memory of his brother Don who had died young? If so, he never let me feel it. The atmosphere he maintained between us was courteous, kindly, and mild.
Thus it was only later and at second hand that I learned from Donna how relieved her dad had been when I washed out in the early round of interviews for a Rhodes Scholarship—which he regarded, she explained, as a British Empire ploy to imbue idealistic young Americans with socialism.
Though I was touched at his restraint toward me about this, the concern struck me as a bit over the top. Not until many years later—Exhibit A: Bill Clinton—did I realize he was on some level absolutely right.
It seemed the same kindly forbearance from a wise older man to an immature younger one was operating years later, when I quit the White House speechwriting staff and went public with my criticisms of President Nixon’s handling of the Watergate scandal.
If I had to bet, it’s probable Mort disapproved of his daughter’s husband going to the barricades in this way, both as a matter of good form and in terms of Republican loyalty. He never said so, however.
Nor did he go behind my back to Donna about it, as the stereotype of a “meddlesome in-law” might predict. That wouldn’t have been Mort D’Evelyn’s way. He was too much the gentleman, had too much class. But I’m getting ahead of my story.
Order John’s New Book: ‘Mort: A Memoir’
The Correspondent
In July 1966, together again on the Sky Valley and Round-Up staff, Donna went with me to Denver, where I was sworn in for the Naval Officer Candidate class to start in late fall, and then to Colorado Springs, where we pretend-shopped for engagement rings at The Broadmoor.
Within a few weeks, we were buying a ring for real at Johnson & Wood in Menlo Park, the jeweler her maternal grandfather had founded, and I was tremulously asking Mort and Patty for their daughter’s hand in marriage. They were gentle with me and said yes!
Donna’s father didn’t quite beam that day. But half a year later, in giving away the bride on April 16, 1967, she veiled and radiant, I starchy in my new ensign’s uniform, Mort beamed as one never imagined he could.
And then came the sparkling letters he wrote us (actually Donna, but addressing me as well out of politeness) over the next six months during my submarine training in New London, Connecticut.
It was my first experience of the epistolary Mort, and on the page in his perfect cursive with fountain pen,he showed a jaunty, chatty, witty, playful, tender and even poetic side we seldom or never saw in person. Not really a different man, but far more of the man than he ordinarily revealed, colorful with a brighter palette, tuneful in an unsuspected key.
Those vividly expressive letters to his (and my) Donna, “Boo” as he had fondly called her since childhood, kept up to the end of his life, gladdening her heart in good times and bad, and helping me remember—when I was with him—how much that was lyrical, whimsical, soulful and, yes, boyish still pulsed beneath the man’s often impassive exterior.
In later years after both Mort and Patty were gone, we discovered a trove of his early letters written to her before their marriage, which reveal even more of this unseen dimension. Seldom has the maxim that one can’t judge a book by its cover been better illustrated.
The Gardener
Over the next seven years, before the illness that took him from us at 59, Mort would see each of his sons take a bride and watch Donna move with me from California to Connecticut to Hawaii to Maryland,while presenting him with three grandchildren: Christina, then Jennifer, then Daniel.
It was he who started calling our first daughter Tina, the name she has gone by ever since, and observing his cooing tenderness with the baby girl was my initiation into Mort’s uncanny rapport with all children.
Never in all our times together–a few days once or twice a year–did Mort D’Evelyn ever tell me in so many words, “Love my daughter as I love her. Love her children (and yours) as I love them.” He didn’t have to; the message was loud and clear. He taught me that priceless lesson by his actions, and I could not be more grateful for it.
When the D’Evelyns would come to visit us, I’d get endearing glimpses of the gallant Mort when at breakfast he insisted on more of the apple pie Donna had baked for the previous night’s dinner; or the imperturbable Mort when hotel accommodations weren’t to his mother-in-law’s satisfaction; or the political Mort when he testified to Congress (in vain, alas) about natural oil seeps in the Santa Barbara Channel.
Mort at one of the oil wells he brought in, 1946
When we came to visit them, I’d form indelible memories of Mort the master gardener, shirtless, bronzed, tending his roses and camellias; or Mort the intellectual networker arranging a career-horizons visit for me with columnist George Crocker, an icon of the California right; or Mort the conservative reformer maneuvering (unsuccessfully, alas) to land a chair for Milton Friedman at Stanford.
The Sequoia
The last time I saw Mort was when he and Patty spent Christmas 1973 at our home outside Washington. We felt a twinge of concern at how frequently he needed to disappear for a rest—but amidst the excitement of the season, the stir over our impending move to Denver, and the grandparents’ delight in newborn Daniel D’Evelyn Andrews, health worries weren’t a topic. (Not that they ever are, in Christian Science families such as we all were then.)
The last time Donna saw her dad was the following July, rushing out to Palos Verdes for a few days with him as things had become quite grave. Hopes were rising, though, as she flew back to Colorado—only to receive, within hours of rejoining the children and me, the devastating phone call: Mort was gone.
I could show you the very window we were standing by when she got off that call and fell weeping into my arms. Yet I was a most inadequate comforter to my poor wife on that bright summer day, suddenly plunged into bottomless gloom.
I’m afraid that in the moment, my selfish sense of loss blinded me to how shattering this was for her. His death was almost incomprehensible to both of us. A world without Mort D’Evelyn, our sequoia of strength, our rock of integrity, not even 60 and taken from us so suddenly? It couldn’t be. But it was.
Outward & Inward
What made Mort, Mort? My scattered snapshots of memory from a few years as his faraway son-in-law don’t equip me for anything like a definitive answer. Too much time has passed, and too many gaps interrupt the record, for a full-dress biography to be possible now, nearly half a century after his passing.
But Donna and I are the fortunate inheritors of boxes and boxes of D’Evelyn family albums, letters, clippings, photos, and fragments—probably fifty pounds by weight—from which one can trace a pretty complete thread of Mort’s background, upbringing, and life story.
With these I can at least sketch a likeness of what St. Paul calls the outward man (II Cor. 4:16). And this in turn, it’s hoped, may give the reader some acquaintance with the inward man, the Mort whom his wife and children so adored, whom his friends and colleagues so esteemed, and whom I’m convinced we could all stand to learn from and emulate. The story starts in 1915 at Stockton in California's Central Valley, on the longest day of the year.
* * * * *
So begins my new book Mort: A Memoir: Remembering the D’Evelyns of California. Morton D’Evelyn wrote to his fiancee, Patricia Johnson, shortly before their wartime wedding in April 1942. about “this splendid edifice we’re building.” What my wife’s father and mother went on to build remains a shining example of the things Americans cherish most: faith, family, freedom. “What can the righteous do,” warns King David in Psalm 11, “if the foundations be destroyed?” By keeping alive such grand legacies as Mort and Patty’s, we can help see it never comes to that. May you enjoy reliving their story as much as I’ve enjoyed telling it.
Bridegroom with my dad and Mort, April 16, 1967