Tom Evans was a dynamic Westinghouse engineer who helped build power plants and desalination facilities around the globe. Even after he relocated to Alpharetta as a retiree 25 years ago, he continued to operate in high gear.
His vision of retirement had no place for idleness, said a longtime friend, Don Blaine of Cumming. Instead, Mr. Evans saw it as an opportunity to join other retirees in performing community service and hiking, biking and rafting together.
So it was that Mr. Evans conceived the idea for the Windward Association of Retired Men (WARM), a group that began with a few men gathered around a restaurant table and grew to scores of members.
Over the last two decades, said Alpharetta Mayor Arthur Letchas, WARM has done the city a great favor, taking the lead in its Clean & Beautiful campaigns, its recycling program, the establishment of a local YMCA and a community Meals on Wheels operation.
Mr. Evans had a hand in all those efforts, Mr. Blaine said.
“For instance, it was Tom’s idea to set up the eight-mile-long bike trail along Big Creek that connects with Roswell’s bike trail and soon will connect with one in Forsyth County,” he said.
“Tom was an unusually considerate guy,” Mr. Blaine added. “Once the two of us made a Meals on Wheels delivery to an old man living in a trailer that was unbearably hot. That night I called Tom and said we should get that old man a window air-conditioner before he is overcome by the heat. Tom said, ‘I already got him one this afternoon.’”
Thomas Golladay Evans, 87, of Alpharetta died Jan. 12 at a Naples (Fla.) hospice of complications following a stroke. His memorial service is 11 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 29 at Northside Chapel Funeral Home in Roswell, with burial to follow at Highland Cemetery in Anniston, Ala., next to his late wife, Elaine Killebrew Evans, who died in 2008.
Born in Old Hickory, Tenn., and reared in Nashville, Mr. Evans earned a Vanderbilt University degree in electrical engineering and went to work in 1945 for Westinghouse, which at the time was rebuilding infrastructure shattered during World War II and bringing power to countries that had none.
His 37-year career took him to 50 countries. And it wasn’t all sightseeing and five-star hotels. As he wrote in a Vanderbilt alumni magazine:
“I was robbed by a Moro tribesman with a wicked-looking dagger on an interisland freighter in Philippine waters, nearly drowned off the coast of Africa and barely escaped a murderous mob in Lagos, Nigeria, that was angered over the 1960 assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba. I stayed in a hotel in New Delhi that had open windows and as a result had monkeys climbing in my room. I argued the pros and cons of democracy for three hours with the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasia Somoza, and made a presentation on nuclear power plants to a utility company in Hiroshima after the president of the utility, who had invited me, opened the meeting by telling me his wife and children had been killed by the atomic bomb.”
When Cuba’s Fidel Castro shut off the water to the U.S. base at Guantanamo in 1964, the Navy called Westinghouse.
Mr. Evans was dispatched to Washington, said a Westinghouse colleague, Richard Kimball of New Alexander, Pa. At that time, the Navy had three tankers continuously hauling water to Guantanamo, and it wanted desalination plants built at Guantanamo within six months, he said.
Westinghouse disassembled a plant it had recently built in California, and under the direction of Mr. Evans and his project manager, Paul Lorenzo, the plant was reassembled and two similar plants were built within six months, Mr. Kimball said, earning Westinghouse the Navy’s Award of Excellence.
In 1972 Mr. Evans was assigned to Brussels, Belgium, where he was president of Westinghouse Electric Nuclear Energy Systems -- Europe. Three years later he moved to Pittsburgh, where he headed strategic planning before retiring in 1982.
Survivors include three daughters, Susan Wille of Grass Valley, Calif., Sally Schenk of Stamford, Conn., and Vivian Duncan of Whitmore, Calif.; four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
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