Southwestern Collection

In Memoriam

Members, friends, and employees of the TSHA were stunned and saddened at the unexpected passing of our good friend and former colleague Evelyn Stehling this past June in Austin. Evelyn started at the TSHA in 1983 as membership secretary. When she left in 2003, she was the executive assistant, one of the top administrative positions in the organization. During her twenty years of service, Evelyn worked extensively in the Association's educational programs and coordinated the TSHA's work with the Philosophical Society of Texas. The following is the eulogy given by longtime TSHA employee George Ward at Evelyn's memorial service, June 28, 2010.

I worked with Evelyn for twenty years at the Texas State Historical Association on the University of Texas Campus. Many people here today are part of that family of friends who knew Evelyn so well in her many years at the TSHA—from her days as a young college graduate hired by Colleen Kain in 1983, to her days, following Colleen's retirement, when Evelyn took over as the new Queen Bee of the TSHA.

Evelyn was smart, beautiful, shy, but boisterous at times when you knew her, always stylishly dressed—except when she was riding her bike, or punching away in the gym, or sprinting for the finish line, but even then she looked stylish. Little Evelyn had the most slender, expressive hands, but they fit just fine in her rugged boxing gloves. She was well read, sophisticated, elegant, always wearing a snappy new pair of shoes (Nordstrom's never had a better customer than Evelyn); she could be quiet (even solemn) yet she could laugh raucously (and I might add, I never heard anyone sneeze as loud as Evelyn did). She may have been small in stature but she was huge in spirit. I can remember a thousand times hearing her footsteps clicking forcefully down the hall at the TSHA in one of those stylish pairs of high-heels. You know how you can tell people by the way they walk—Evelyn's was a forceful walk I could nearly always recognize. One day I heard what I thought were her sharp distinctive steps but I wasn't entirely sure until I heard a ferociously loud sneeze—no attempt to muffle it. I called out "Gesundheit, Evelyn!"

Another thing I noticed about her was that nobody could blush like Evelyn—red and purple color would run up her neck, across her face, up to the very top of her head. She blushed when somebody complimented her; she blushed when she was embarrassed; she blushed when she was mad. And I can say with some authority that she blushed every time she got a good hand in poker. You may wonder why I mention poker—well, it was because for a good number of those twenty years that so many of us worked together, our TSHA family's central spot was the kitchen in Sid Richardson Hall. And in that kitchen we ate (estimating conservatively) well over 5,000 lunches with Evelyn. And for several of those years we had a long-running poker game. Now it was not serious poker. We played for pennies—a big pot was maybe fifteen or twenty cents. Largely because of her blushing—and her complete honesty—Evelyn had the worst poker face of anyone who ever played in our games. As a result, she essentially never won a hand until one day when probably the biggest pot we'd ever had was on the table. We were playing some silly game with all kinds of wild cards, so people were getting straight flushes, five of a kind, that sort of thing. The betting went on and on, with Evelyn blushing madly and bumping up the pot. It was the biggest pot ever—maybe two or three dollars—and then we all flipped over our hands. We each looked at our cards and called out what we had; Evelyn cried out in triumph: "Five Kings!" The only person who hadn't said anything yet was Ann Russell, our long-time bookkeeper...