Janet L. Evans

November 11, 1931 - April 15, 2020

Janet L. Evans, 88, of Germantown, Tennessee died on Wednesday, April 15th, 2020 at her home. She was born on Wednesday, November 11, 1931 in Gratz, Pennsylvania, to Daniel Milton Knohr and Jennie Lehr Knohr. Raised a Lutheran in a "Pennsylvania Dutch" community, Janet was the youngest of eight children, including three brothers who served in World War Two. Some of her earliest childhood memories were of her maternal grandmother, Mary Maurer, who a week shy of her sixteenth birthday saw Abraham Lincoln's funeral train in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Janet graduated from Shippensburg University in 1953, where her favorite teacher, who took an interest in promoting her professional career, was labor historian John Bernard Hogg, the first chair of Shippensburg's history and philosophy department. For the next several years after her graduation Janet taught twelfth grade English in Pennsylvania at Hershey High School in Hershey and Tri-Valley High School in Hegins, from which she herself had graduated in 1949. At both schools she sponsored the Drama Clubs and directed the annual school plays, which were One Foot in Heaven, Father of the Bride and Ayn Rand's popular courtroom mystery The Night of January 16th. In 1956 she left Pennsylvania with her good friend, the late Ethel Long, to attend graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. There she met, and on February 5, 1958, married, John S. Evans, an economics graduate student from Amarillo, Texas. Janet later taught sixth grade English at Jolley Elementary School in Vermillion, South Dakota and for six years managed Brooks Fashion Stores successively at McFarland and University Malls in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. With her husband John she raised their two children, Jennifer and Curtis. In her leisure time she enjoyed reading, films, games (particularly word games, at which she was fantastically adept) and travel. Janet was preceded in death by her brothers Louis, Alan, Earl and Ralph Knohr and her sisters Mary Knohr, Ruth Hunstsinger and Alice Herb. She is survived by her husband John, her son Curtis J. Evans and her daughter Jennifer A. Hendricks, all of Germantown, Tennessee, aswellas her son-in-law, James L. Hendricks, of Germantown, Tennessee, her two grandsons, James and John Hendricks of Gaithersberg, Maryland and Germantown, Tennessee, and nine nieces and nephews. Memorial contributions can be made to the Center for Creative Education at https://cceflorida.org/ and Metavivor, promoting metastatic breast cancer awareness and research, at https://www.metavivor.org/. Given the current national conditions and the family's concern for the health and well-being of others, there will be a memorial service at a later date.