Larry Evans was born in 1943 in Kansas City, Missouri and spent his early childhood on a farm near the banks of the McKenzie River in Oregon with his parents, older brother and younger sister. His family moved to Portland when he was eight, where he lived until he left for college.
After attending Whitman College his freshman and sophomore years, he transferred to the University of Oregon, majoring in Economics. He dropped out of college between his junior and senior years to travel and find “the meaning of life”. Intending to be gone for a year or more, he traveled throughout the Far East, India, Nepal and Australia. After hitchhiking from Darwin to Alice Springs, and then on to Adelaide, he was shocked upon arriving in Adelaide to learn there was a nationwide search being conducted to find him – the result of the draft board in Portland issuing his draft notice. After much correspondence and international publicity on the matter, the draft board agreed that if he would return to America and re-enroll at the university he could regain his student deferment.
Upon graduating in 1965 he was accepted into the U.S. Marine Corps as an aviation candidate and went through OCS at Quantico, Virginia. He was commissioned a Second Lieutenant and transferred to Pensacola, Florida to begin flight training. While in flight training, but on leave, he met a stewardess on a flight from Portland to Chicago. Their wedding took place shortly thereafter. Joan still tells friends who ask how they met, “I was a stewardess and he was a complaining passenger… and not a lot has changed.”
Larry received his Wings of Gold in August, 1967 and after less than one year in a fighter squadron in Beaufort, South Carolina, flying the F-4 Phantom II, he received his orders to Vietnam. Shortly before leaving for Vietnam, Joan became pregnant. Based in Chu Lai, RVN, Larry flew 144 combat missions during his 13 month tour of duty there. Upon returning stateside he got to see his baby girl for the first time – she was just over five months old.
Larry left the Marine Corps in 1970, eventually joining Steelcase, the largest manufacturer of office furniture in the world, as a District Manager in San Francisco. Not wanting to leave the Bay Area, he turned down several promotions that would have meant moving his family – now with two daughters. He left Steelcase in 1980 to join the Rucker Fuller Company, a Steelcase dealer, as Vice President of Sales and Marketing. In 1984 he became President/CEO of the company and led the way for it to become the second largest office furniture dealership in the U.S.
While he enjoyed the office furnishings business, Larry’s real passion was contemporary art, and in 1989 he made the decision to leave Rucker Fuller and become an art dealer. It was a traumatic time, with one daughter in college and the other about to begin, to leave a high paying position and start anew, but he had been listening to Joseph Campbell talk about “follow your bliss”, and decided this was what he needed to do.
Larry opened and ran an art gallery in San Francisco until 2006, and still actively deals privately and still loves what he does. His search for “the meaning of life” has been fulfilled as a Marine aviator, a CEO, an art dealer, husband, father, and grandfather. His memoir recounts his journey to finding that place in his life.
