John Evans

John B. Evans

March 6, 1935 - Nov. 13, 2016

John Basil Evans of San Francisco and Acampo died on Nov. 13 in the arms of his wife of 54 years at S. Sacramento Kaiser Hospital following a long illness.

Born in Anacortes, WA, March 6, 1935, the youngest child of Peter Evans Sr. and Fotini Drake Evans, John attended Everett High School, leaving in 1952, his junior year, to join the U.S. Army. He served in the Korean War and, while stationed at Camp Desert Rock, NV, he survived 13 atomic bomb tests, suffering life-threatening radiation sickness following one explosion. He earned an AA degree at Everett Community College and his BA from the University of Washington. He married Lynette Buse on Nov. 10, 1962, and the couple lived in Seattle, Merced, Las Vegas, New Hampshire and South Lake Tahoe before settling in San Francisco in 1983.

John worked as a chef, restaurateur, caterer and consultant, caviar and wine salesman. Writing with Lynette under the pen name John Lee, his lively columns on food appeared in The Everett Herald, Las Vegas Sun, Fosters Daily Democrat (Dover, N.H.), Lake Tahoe News and San Francisco Progress, and he contributed a column on ethnic cuisine to the San Francisco Examiner. He was a member of the now-defunct French Chef's Society. In retirement, he has been a wine grape and olive grower in Acampo.

An empathetic extrovert whose joie de vivre infected all he met, John mentored his many nieces, nephews and friends' children, as they shared stories and food around the Thanksgiving table, toured the historic sites of New England, rode ski lifts and picnicked together at Lake Tahoe, introducing them to opera, symphonies and jazz along with raw oysters and fresh lobsters, offering life as well as cooking lessons on forays through Chinatown and the ethnic markets of San Francisco. A lifelong liberal, feminist, voracious reader and raconteur, he delighted family and friends with tales of his youth, whether his year as chef to le Duc de Caraman on the yacht Xebec III docked in the Seine River, while he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris; hitchhiking through the Middle East; sailing the waters of the Pacific Northwest; dancing with Gypsies on the shores of the Black Sea, leading some of France's greatest chefs on tours of San Francisco's Chinatown and then dining on foie gras and chantrelles with them in their kitchens in France, or marching on Washington, D.C. with Lynette in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.

He is survived by his wife and best friend, former managing editor of the San Francisco Progress and retired San Francisco Chronicle Home&Garden editor Lynette Evans; brother Peter Evans Jr. of Mountlake Terrace, WA, sisters Marjorie Howard of Monmouth, OR and Evelyn Evans of Glendale, AZ, and numerous nieces and nephews and their families.

Celebrations of his life will be held later in San Francisco and Washington State.