Back in those early, heady days of the Biden administration there was some loose talk about nominating U.S. Sen. Angus King (I-ME) to be director of national intelligence. It didn’t last long, but in the forty-five seconds or so that it percolated, I fired off a column suggesting that – should the new president make such an astute call – Gov. Janet Mills ought to nominate state Rep. Jeffrey Evangelos (I-Friendship) to fill his seat.
That outside-the-box suggestion put me on Jeff’s radar screen, and he invited me to coffee at Moody’s Diner. While there was much on which we didn’t agree politically, I found myself really liking the guy. He fought for stuff. In the age of the compliance monkey, that is a rare and admirable trait.
As we got to know each other, I was reminded we actually met decades before. Jeff used to run a Central Asia imports shop in Waldoboro, which drew me in as a man in my early twenties about to ship out to the little-known region. He wore a lot of hats in his career, and most of them had to do with public service: school superintendent, town manager, state rep, and when I last saw him, coordinator of the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president campaign in Maine.
One of the things we shared beyond an interest in the great beyond was an appreciation of the fact that the criminal justice system in Maine and America is badly broken. While we may have differed on some details of how to fix, I was impressed by the lengths to which he’d go to move the needle rather than just lamenting woefully about the problem.
Jeff’s effort to reinstitute parole in Maine was in effect the work of a one-man dynamo. Not every prisoner is Eliot Cutler, a good many actually do merit parole. Maine did away with it in 1976, but if administered properly, it could be a powerful incentive for rehabilitation. Year after year, Jeff campaigned for its return until he finally got a study group. It was a dead letter in the Mills administration perhaps, but a start anyhow.
When Jeff felt justice was being denied, he fought hard to get those at the short end of the stick a chance to have their cases reviewed. There are a number of folks around the state who will long remember him for this.
A few years back, I came up with the idea of teaching politics in prison. Civic engagement, after all, is usually a deterrent to recidivism. When the pointy heads at the University of Maine declared I wasn’t sufficiently credentialed to teach politics, Jeff came to my defense and raised the issue with various authorities. While they remained unconvinced that anyone without a master’s degree had any business teaching, he did at least make them listen.
Sometimes, that’s all you can really ask.
Jeff never particularly cared that I was a conservative. He was, after all, unaffiliated. As his unaffiliated status and volunteering for RFK Jr. suggested, he pretty much thought party labels were useless. And he wasn’t wrong on that. Ideas and arguments were more important to him than the club to which one belonged.
A farmer, Jeff understood the importance of seasons, and the organic change they bring. It is better to plant a seed of the tree whose shade your grandchildren will enjoy than to obsess about one’s immediate needs. To me he seemed like a guy who just wanted to make things better.
I was saddened to learn of Jeff’s death this week. When I met him in 2020, at a time most people were cringing over COVID, he told me he had like seven different types of cancer, but it didn’t seem to faze him. He kept fighting for other people regardless.
May his memory inspire others.
