16 minute read
SABA President David Evans: An Uncommon Leader
By June Moynihan and David Evans
There is no doubt that David Evans is the product of Jerry Evans and Patricia Sue "Pat" Carey. Jerry and Pat met in Nashville, Tennessee, where both were doing post-graduate work. Jerry, having completed a degree in philosophy at Southwestern in Memphis, Tennessee, was studying for his Masters of Divinity at Vanderbilt, with a plan to be a Methodist minister. Pat was from Corpus Christi, attending Scarritt College for Christian Workers, after graduating from what was then Texas A&I in Kingsville.
Both had been raised in the Methodist Church, with similar Sunday morning rituals. Jerry’s father, Dillard, would dutifully drop Jerry, his sister June, and family matriarch Mary at church every Sunday morning and then go fishing with his buddies. Many a weekend, Pat and her brother Carson would go to church with their mother Ila, while father Everett was “praying” from a deer stand somewhere in the Texas Hill Country. It was from their time in their respective pews that Pat and Jerry learned of two important tenets of the Methodist faith: that followers must use logic and reason in all matters of faith, and that ministering to others is one’s highest calling.
As a pair, Jerry and Pat were the epitome of this ethos and made the perfect team. Jerry was quiet and contemplative, eschewing small talk in favor of eternal existential questions, much like his mother, Mary. Indeed, while David has no memories of his other grandparents from his childhood, Mary was a huge influence in his life, visiting him from Memphis for a couple of weeks every year. Though such visits were short in comparison to the time many children have with their grandparents, Mary made up for it with long “chats” with David about issues big and small, worldly and otherwise.
Meanwhile, Pat was all about living a life of service to people, armed with a gift for gab that was peppered with expressions from her days spent with her father, uncles, and work family on flooring jobs in a part of South Texas, where some dogs didn’t hunt and certain questions weren’t worth asking when the ox was in the ditch.
Pat and Jerry’s sister, June Evans, were both students at Nashville’s Scarritt College, a Christian college that trained women to serve globally as missionaries and church leaders. Well ahead of its time, Scarritt was the first private college to racially integrate in 1952. And five years later, the college hosted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to speak at a time when, as Dr. King observed, the most segregated hour in America was 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
June and Pat joined the Nashville Student Movement (“NSM”) led by a young and charismatic Baptist minister named John Lewis. The NSM would later become the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Pastor Lewis would later become House Representative Lewis. June, Pat, and others from their class participated in many of the first civil rights sit-ins and protests in Nashville.
With the recent passing of Lewis, Pat reminisced, “I remember I carpooled with John one night to meet with others at a Methodist Church on the outskirts of town so as not to draw too much attention to ourselves. I had never met someone that young who was so ‘about something.’” But it wasn’t long before Pat found something to “be about.” Not many years after she graduated, Pat teamed with other parents in SAISD to mainstream children with special needs into their local schools, when the common practice was to put such children on buses and warehouse them at a central place, out of sight, out of mind.
So, these were the values that formed the home into which David was born. His parents began their church ministry in San Antonio, and their family grew, first with his elder sister, Mary Susanne, then the middle child John, who was born with profound special and medical needs. The family eventually transferred back to Memphis, where David was born.
When David was three years old, his parents made the difficult decision to leave the Methodist ministry due to the frequent moves required to build career tenure. They chose to return to their adopted hometown of San Antonio. This was partly due to the rich community they found here, but mostly the medical support that came from a whip smart and much-loved pediatrician, Dr. Ella Zuschlag, who made many a house call to help John as well as other special needs children.
They settled in a cozy home on Colleen Drive in a friendly workingclass neighborhood between St. Mary’s University and Jefferson High School. They soon started deepening their San Antonio roots. Jerry found a new career as a bookkeeper at a local hardware chain called Handy Dan, and Pat worked as an elementary school teacher, starting at nearby Madison Elementary, where David went to kindergarten.
Their neighborhood was mostly Catholic, participating in activities sponsored by St. Paul’s. Not long after David started first grade at St. Paul’s, the Evans family joined the church and converted to Catholicism. David was an occasional Boy Scout (never got past Tenderfoot), middling altar boy (never did pre-Vatican II), but very active in the St. Paul’s Youth Program (Life Camp Alumnus). It was in the youth program where he widened his friend group to include students who attended Incarnate Word, Central, and Providence.
While the family’s social life was mostly steeped in church relationships, David and his dad’s great shared love was for the San Antonio Spurs. David recalls, “These were the pink and teal Spurs days. During the season, we would listen to all the games on the alarm clock radio with the lights off in my parents’ bedroom.” Once a year, his dad would get tickets to attend a game at the then-HemisFair Arena. David recalls once waiting patiently outside the team exit door to ask George Gervin to sign his basketball: “So, we are just outside the regular doors. No security or handlers. And out comes the Ice Man, and he grabs my ball with one massive hand and signs it and gives it back to me with a smile.”
Early on, when asked what he wanted to be, David said that he wanted to become a surgeon. Assuming his reasons were altruistic, no one really investigated his reasons for declaring the occupation. The truth is that David would arrive home from school a few hours before his mother would arrive home from her teaching job. While he was meant to be practicing the piano, David instead worked through the WGN afternoon line-up of MASH and Good Times. “I wanted to be Dr. Hawkeye Pierce. He seemed to be having the time of his life,” says David. Pierce was irreverent, funny, and saving lives. As young kids are wont to do, David assumed it was the job of surgeon that made Hawkeye so amusing.
For most of his formative years, he was certain he would become a surgeon and embody the cheeky Pierce. A seventh grade GT English class threw a wrench in that plan, though, and that was the first time David considered law. The regular teacher was out on maternity leave, and the substitute teacher was not all that interested in the lesson plans left for him to use. As it happened, the substitute was attending law school at St. Mary’s. He decided to have the students do a mock divorce trial. David remembers the feeling he had when he was able to exclude a classmate playing the role of a child from testifying against her mother because of the emotional toll it would take on the child. David got his first taste of positive courtroom feedback, and he was hooked.
David, Katie, Sophia, and Shepherd with family dogs, Livi (white) and Ginger (grey).
photographed for San Antonio Lawyer in North Carolina by Nathan Baerreis
After David started Jefferson High School in 1989, his Uncle Carson invited him for the first of several extended summer visits. Carson’s work as an engineer and senior executive took him on many overseas trips and postings, and he was recently returned stateside to Cohasset, Massachusetts, a tony coastal suburb of Boston.
David remembers his first trip being very much the country mouse visiting the city mouse: "It was the first time I had ever been on a plane, and we ended up at the fanciest house I had ever been in, but it was the least fancy house in the neighborhood. I remember that my uncle had a home office with his own fax machine that was constantly feeding this never-ending scroll of paper onto his office floor, detailing the various deals he was working in Asia. Even though he lived in a way I had never seen before, he did all of his own home renovation projects since he grew up working for my granddad. And I soon realized that he was going to teach me enough about demo-ing rooms, splitting wood, tamping gravel, roughing-in electrical, and sweat-fitting pipes to know that I would go hungry working with my hands.”
David considers Carson’s advice as very influential to career considerations. “My uncle told me to go into something where you needed a stamp or a credential because then you aren’t competing against everyone who says they can do something. And I could tell that he was probably saving a few thousand dollars a week on labor by having us do the projects instead of hiring them out. But he was making many thousands of dollars on the phone during our lunch breaks, closing deals that he was doing on the other side of the world.”
David describes his four years at Jefferson High School as a joy. “I did fine academically, but when I think of high school, I think of my friends from marching band and various musical stage productions.” David was elected student council president his senior year and enjoyed the leadership position. By senior year, he also took a serious look at military service and decided to apply to West Point, after receiving an invitation to do so after attending Boys State in Austin.
He received a commendation from Senator Lloyd Bentsen, but as David wistfully remembers, “My failure to enroll in West Point correlates directly with my inability to do a pull-up, of all things. Not surprisingly, late night trips to Taco Cabana after marching a football halftime show in the Mighty Mustang Band was not building the best physical fitness foundation for a military academy education.”
Before his dreams of military academy admission were dashed over his love of bean-and-cheese tacos, David attended a college fair at Brackenridge High School, where West Point would have admission counselors. The West Point table was near a table for the Centenary College of Louisiana. The alumnus staffing the table convinced David to visit the small liberal arts college in Shreveport, which is affiliated with the Methodist Church. The on-campus interview and promise of significant financial aid sold David, and he committed to Centenary with plans to major in political science and pre-law.
The oldest liberal arts college west of the Mississippi, Centenary College is tiny, with historically fewer than 900 students enrolled at any time. David played trombone (poorly) in various ensembles and joined the TKE Fraternity, where he was president his senior year. He was also involved with student council every year and served as student body president his junior year. The Student Body Association managed a sixfigure budget that funded various campus extra-curricular programs, like the student newspaper and radio station. This level of volunteer commitment and leadership was simply a continuation of what he was always doing.
When David was a college junior, he met a freshman student council member, Katie Cherie Tedesco. Katie had just turned eighteen, and David was dating another girl, also on student council. Katie and David saw each other regularly at student council events and talked of their shared love of various bands and interest in learning guitar. Near the end of the school year, Katie presented David with a mix tape at a student council meeting in front of the rest of a large group of students, including the girl David was dating at the time. That mix tape of songs by the Beatles, Cranberries, and Pixies started a two-month “will they, won’t they” reminiscent of the sitcom Friends’ Ross and Rachel storyline. As in all good stories, love won. They shared their first kiss that Memorial Day (cue to sunset) and married almost five years later to the day, the month David graduated law school in Austin.
At the end of that summer, after a brief pre-bar review honeymoon to the western North Carolina home where Katie spent part of her childhood, Katie returned to Shreveport for medical school, and David reported for his first day at the San Antonio office of Akin Gump on September 4. Financing Katie’s medical school and a move from Austin to San Antonio, the newly formed Evans family bank account was running on fumes.
“We cut up my credit cards that summer, and we planned ahead, knowing that my first paycheck would be a pretty hefty check that would include relocation and bar course reimbursements,” said David. Their plan probably would have been fine any other year, but this was 2001, and David’s first payday landed right after September 11, 2001.
Due to the size of the check, David’s account was flagged and a bank hold placed. For about a week, David’s only available funds were what he could charge to their only remaining credit card, a Diamond Shamrock gas card. So, during his first month at Akin Gump, David would visit the closest Diamond Shamrock for lunch and dinner. “I avoided folks that week for fear someone would invite me out to lunch, and I had literally no money to pay,” David recalls.
By 2004, Katie started her Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation residency at San Antonio’s UT Health Sciences Center. In February of that year, after 5,000 billable hours spent with employment law mentors Bob Bettac, Shelton Padgett, Ruben Cantu, Michael Galo, and Christine Reinhard, David moved to Langley & Banack, where he had spent two summers clerking during law school and knew he would return someday, given how wonderful his experience had been.
Ralph Langley and Buddy Banack were legal lions of our legal community, and they lent their names to a firm that expected its attorneys would find a way to meaningful bar and community service. David shares, “Sylvia Cardona was an attorney at L&B who was instrumental in getting me involved with the young lawyers bar. Some of my best friendships are with attorneys I met through SA Young Lawyers Association (SAYLA) leadership and the Texas Young Lawyers Association.”
Kristal Thomson, now a shareholder at Langley & Banack, remembers, “It is impossible to think about those SAYLA Board meetings without smiling. The group was mostly funny people, and David provided a lot of mirth. It was really enjoyable to work that much and still laugh the whole time.”
David eventually served as SAYLA president in 2007. In 2010, SAYLA selected David as the San Antonio Outstanding Young Lawyer, and he was ultimately selected as the American Bar Association’s Outstanding Young Lawyer for 2010, in recognition of his years of commitment to local bar leadership, mentorship to high school students through mock trial coaching, and board service to community organizations such as Habitat for Humanity. David says, “I was really only doing what had been done for me. I don’t expect every student who participates in a mock trial program to become a lawyer, but the speaking and thinking skills can serve someone in so many other ways in life. And that seventhgrade mock trial experience with a substitute teacher/law student was a light-bulb moment in my life. So if it can happen for one kid a year, then it is worth it.”
David and Katie's son Shepherd (7) and daughter Sophia (10), with one of their family dogs, Ginger.
photo by Nathan Baerreis
Sylvia Cardona, now a partner at Jefferson Cano, shares, “David is a trusted friend, but what clinched our friendship for me was when we were new partners at Langley & Banack.” Cardona was tasked with putting together the program for the firm retreat and asked David to help write a script and design a program. “David and I dressed as mimes,” Cardona explains, “and created a performance piece to illustrate that all members of the firm are needed to help ‘row the boat’ for success to occur. The portrayal was rich with wildly executed interpretive dance moves. While impactful and entertaining, no one who took themselves too seriously could have pulled it off. From that day forward, I knew that David would do almost anything to help a friend, even if it meant embarrassing himself in front of peers.”
In 2016, David launched his solo practice and he designed a Fiesta medal to celebrate his new enterprise. Of course, it was a tribute to the SA Spurs and to Tim Duncan’s recent retirement. David notes the medal has the oldschool Spur colors and the lyrics from Selena’s famous ComoLa Flor on two halves of a broken heart. The medal duet was sold only in pairs and raised much-needed funds for the YMCA Youth & Government Program that David coached at Sam Houston High School for two years.
The medal was meant to promote Evans’ new law business, but it is impossible for him to talk about himself without including some hometown devotion and community program support, all packaged in an unconventional and entertaining way. Like Fiesta, David is puro San Antonio.
Cardona concludes, “I am proud to see my longtime friend lead our bar association. To quote a TYLA saying, David is truly an ‘uncommon leader.’ During these uncommon times, our bar will benefit from David’s years of leadership experience, his inspired sense of humble humor, and his genuine devotion to be of service to his colleagues and San Antonio.”
June Moynihan was named the Executive Director of the San Antonio Bar Association in May 2017. Licensed to practice in California, Moynihan is a graduate of the University of California-Hastings College of the Law.
David Evans has been in private practice in San Antonio for 20 years. He has worked in a large international firm, a mid-sized local firm, and now as a sole practitioner. Evans has been involved in various bar organizations, and especially enjoys when our legal community comes together to help other organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Children’s Rehabilitation Institute Teleton.
