Priscilla "Percy" Sims Evans Dunlap

1913 - 2005

By John Ford Evans

A short biography about your mom requires considerable care. Not to mention delicacy. Moms know. Even if they have passed, which has happened to Priscilla Sims Evans Carlisle Dunlap. She died in 2005 a couple of days after Christmas at age 92. What was so amazing is how long she lived for how little she took care of herself. Smoked cigarettes from an early age. Drank considerably. She loved me a lot and was always proud of me even when I faltered.

Looking backwards, I did not pay close attention to things such as interpersonal relationships until I was about 12. Things started to come in to focus more around then. As you will see, that’s also when Mom was around less. Actually, it was the Ranch that kept us linked. She was always there in the summers, and so was I. At least until college. So I can say that she was a good mom despite what others might focus on as shortcomings in other areas of her personal relationships.

Percy was unfailingly upbeat around me, and very encouraging. I used to copy drawings from the funny papers, and I remember when we lived on Paxton Avenue on Chicago’s South Side (I must have been 4 at the time) her telling me to go back and try again to draw Dick Tracy when I expressed dissatisfaction with my work product. When we lived on Elm Street on the near north side of Chicago, she thought I might be interested in art, so she enrolled me in a beginners art class at Chicago’s Art Institute. I lost interest back then. Yet, now I dabble in watercolors. She could play the piano. And she did often. After the War she always had a piano wherever she lived. She played popular. She played Classical. To interest me in music when we lived on Elm Street, she had me listen to “Peter and the Wolf” to pick up an appreciation of classical music and then had me listen repeatedly to Scheherazade and Bolero and then Tchaikovsky. That stuck. She got tickets to take me to the Chicago Symphony matinees. She set me up with piano lessons to learn to play boogie woogie (an interest at the time). She took me to see “Kiss Me Kate” performed in Chicago to give me a taste of Broadway. When she and I lived in New Port Richey, Florida together she pulled a Tom Sawyer on me so that I actually wanted to vacuum the house (a talent which I have retained to this day and use regularly). In the early 50s, when she had the funds in the early stages of her marriage to San Carlisle, she bought two horses, a Palomino (Goldie)and a brown and white paint quarter horse (Flicker)which were for me to ride. The Ranch still kept Don and Nancy, the horses ridden by EW and Charlotte, but they were long in the tooth and off limits besides. Looking back it is curious that neither parent encouraged me to read.

Thank God for Classic Comics and the card game “Authors” or I would know nothing.

She loved to play the piano for herself, it was cathartic, and as time went by she played louder and louder. Hum the tune and in a flash she could play the whole composition. She loved to laugh and to be positive. She always had a dog. She never failed to burn or seriously singe anything she cooked. In her twilight years, she wrote poetry and did oil paintings.

Wherever she was she wrote long letters to me in her genuinely terrible handwriting. She constantly wrote musical compositions, serious and popular, and even in her seventies she enrolled at Cal Poly to study music theory. She loved to laugh and often told corny jokes or stories. Until Allen, two men in her life turned out to be miserable choices for her, and were the source of unhappiness. There were periods where demon rum commanded her attention and shielded her from some of the unhappiness, Otherwise, she was a happy person most of her life and, for the most part, she always tried to make others around her happy as well. Not a bad mark in life.

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Priscilla Sims was born on Chicago’s south side on January 20, 1913 Whether she was a “surprise” or E.W. and Charlotte were trying for a third boy was not disclosed. In any case, she was definitely the last, and possibly the most indulged of the six Sims children. Ed Sims was by then certainly a well-known, if not genuinely famous, Chicago lawyer, because of a significant role in presidential as well as local Chicago politics, and, of course, because of his role in the Standard Oil case that resulted in a $24 Million dollar fine against the most notorious monopoly of the times. He was also, by most measures, a very successful lawyer, so it was possible for E.W., Charlotte and Priscilla’s three older sisters, Betsy, Helen and Sue (while they were still in the household), to spoil her with special attention, taking her picture, parties, and gifts as well as fashionable clothes, dancing and music lessons, and a proper well-to-do young lady’s education. In many situations in her later life, she may have felt entitled to that special treatment from family members and her mother in particular. It may also be that she came to the unfortunate conclusion that life folded out in front of you without much effort. How long the family or others referred to her by the formal name Priscilla is not recorded, although social columns in the Chicago newspapers consistently reported about her as Priscilla all the way up to the society section article of her 1934 marriage reception. To the family, however, she was simply Percy.

Photos of Percy in a tutu show that she went to dance class and her skills on the piano confirm that she started lessons at an early age. Of course, she followed the family to the Ranch each summer and learned the rudiments of horseback riding, boating and swimming. Uncle Herb was a favorite of hers, and the reverse was true. He was a gentle and skillful coach at the Ranch inducing his wards (nieces and nephews) to achieve on their own by his encouraging words.

In 1926, amidst the Roaring Twenties, Percy was 13, and the Sims family moved uptown to a larger brown stone house on Bellevue Place on the Near North Side of Chicago, a block from the Drake Hotel and within sight of Lake Michigan near the Outer Drive. At the high school level, she briefly attended Girls Latin School, but completed her undergraduate education at other various and suitable schools for young ladies. After high school graduation in 1930, she was admitted to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and briefly studied there. Without photographic evidence to prove her fashion choices in her late teens, it is merely a very good guess that she would have gravitated to the styles of the flappers of the 20s. Her late teens occurred at a time when bootleggers and speakeasies filled the Chicago landscape and were splashed across the newspapers. Al Capone rose to great prominence and reputation along with the rise of criminal activity in Chicago. Percy happily recounted the reception thrown at 112 Bellevue Place for her older brother Frank at the beginning of Frank’s unsuccessful bid to be elected to the Illinois legislature from the 29th Legislative District. Percy recounted that Al Capone and several henchmen arrived at Bellevue Place. Percy played Capone-requested opera melodies on the piano while Capone sang in Italian for the assembled crowd. His henchmen, it turns out, were at the time upstairs making selective acquisitions from Charlotte’s unattended jewelry case. So the story goes.

Fast living in the 1920s was abruptly halted by the October 29, 1929 crash of the stock market, the event which precipitated the Great Depression with its massive job losses and bank failures. How well the Sims family may have been insulated from the effects of the Depression is a guess. E.W.’s corporate clients and his reputation as a successful trial lawyer may have eased the transition. In any case, tales of life at Bellevue Place and at the Ranch do not seem altered by a stressful financial situation.

Every summer, of course was spent at the Ranch, at a time when the North End was a burgeoning farm, and the barn and stables near the Ranch House housed twelve riding horses. Percy was an accomplished rider. A lovely pastel three-quarter length portrait of her as a young woman in full riding paraphernalia was preserved by her, but inexplicably she disapproved of displaying the picture. In addition to horses and the Ranch tennis court where she became a good player, the Ranch offered the Sea Hawk, a converted fishing boat turned into a modest and spartan yacht/ party boat, and the Lipstick, a gaff-rigged sail boat with a centerboard and suitably deep red mainsail. Percy loved the Lipstick and loved to sail it as a young woman.

As America emerged from the Great Depression, young men like Percy’s slightly older brother, Ned Sims and a fellow named Jack Evans, who had graduated from Syracuse University in 1932, found themselves co-workers as executives-in-training at the First National Bank of Chicago. Ned introduced Jack to his younger sister Priscilla, and in 1934 a large society wedding of Percy and Jack occurred at 112 Bellevue Place with a grand reception at the next-door Fortnightly Club. In 1937 a recovering America was broadsided by a major recession. Jack and Percy celebrated the birth of their only son, Johnny, in July of 1937. In those days Percy did not have her own cottage at the Ranch. Instead, Jack and Percy stayed in the Ranch House with son, Johnny. EW and Charlotte lived in the Ranch House as well. This was well before the Camp was upgraded to provide a suite for them.

In the late 30s, Jack and Percy lived on the South Side of Chicago, and belonged to the South Shore Country Club, the site of tennis, golf and social activities, including annual shows put on by the members and actively participated in by both Jack and Percy. After the Depression, people played hard and partied hard and legal alcohol flowed freely including in the lives of Jack and Percy. Percy was provided with a nanny for Johnny. She also had a “colored woman,” as Blacks were referred to in the 1940s, to clean the apartment on Paxton Avenue and babysit so that Percy could get away during the day.

As if lives were not sufficiently jumbled up by the Depression and Prohibition, Hitler was taking over Europe, and finally, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Jack was ultimately given a commission in the Navy and ordered to go to Washington.

In Washington, D.C. the Evans family lived in Fairlington, Virginia a community built from scratch to house the influx of military people that streamed into Washington. Jack worked in the hastily constructed “temporary” two story office buildings on the Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Washington was filled with people pulled away from their normal lives, homes and jobs to be transplanted to a strange location with other disrupted lives. Despite rationing, liquor seemed plentiful and too much so for Jack and Percy. There were many blow-ups but when VE Day finally arrived, Jack took Johnny and Patsy, the family Irish Setter, and all possessions in the family Buick convertible and drove to Chicago. Percy remained in Washington.

Not long after that, Percy took custody of Johnny, and, with no place to stay, convinced EW and Charlotte to let her stay at the Ranch House for the winter. Johnny went to school in Au Gres, sometime walking in snow out to US 23 to be picked up by the school bus. Harsh weather and the high cost of warming the large but uninsulated Ranch House inspired Percy to seek warmer climes. A move to New Port Richey, Florida to be near EW and Charlotte was encouraged by them.

Eventually she returned to Chicago, and she and Jack resumed the marriage in a small apartment on Hyde Park Avenue on the South Side. While there, Jack designed the cottage to be constructed on Percy’s lot facing Saginaw Bay between Betsy’s and Ned’s parcels at the Ranch. That prompted visits to the Ranch for several days mid-winter to see Neil Dingman and his crew working on the construction. Before long, Percy and Jack separated again. In 1948 they resumed the marriage and decided to move to Chicago’s Near North Side. That did not last long. Percy left. Johnny remained with Jack and was enrolled in Chicago Latin School. As part of the settlement, Jack surrendered any claim to Percy’s cottage on Saginaw Bay. Johnny would be raised by Jack and remain at the apartment on Elm Street.

Meanwhile, Percy, unaccustomed to being on her own, stayed with her sisters, first Betsy and then Sue opened her doors at the Coffin’s home in Manhasset on Long Island where she got a job in New York in a department store.

In the early Fifties, Percy returned to her cottage at the Ranch. While there, her path crossed with that of Sanford Carlisle, the recognized “black sheep” member of an otherwise well-regarded Saginaw family. When Percy met him, San was at the time unemployed and he frankly had not enjoyed success despite various endeavors. Nevertheless, they married and he moved into Percy’s cottage. San’s misadventures continued, including an unsuccessful effort to run the Ranch gas station on Route 23. San was clearly living off of Percy and at the same time promoting heavy drinking. Eventually Percy’s sisters and even Aunt Alida Malkus chimed in to get her to leave San and get out of a bad situation. Initially she was angry with all the family advice, but eventually she ended the ill-advised marriage, her savings depleted. She found work as a typist in the logistics section of Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda. While there, she met Allan Dunlap, a master Sergeant in the Air Force. Allan had been born in Scotland, become a U.S. citizen, and proudly served as a sergeant in Gen. George Patton’s Third Army during World War II. At Wurtsmith, Allen was a supervisor of base warehousing for all aircraft parts and equipment. Allen was a genuinely nice man, even-tempered, easy-going, unflappable, and a perfect companion for Percy. They lived for a while at Percy’s cottage but moved to South Pasadena, California when Allen left the Air Force to take a warehouse management position with Sweetheart Cup Company.

Percy rented her cottage in the summers but flew back to Michigan before the rental season to get things ready and reconnect. She truly loved the Ranch and she made every sacrifice necessary to preserve the cottage for herself and ultimately her son, Johnny. She also flew East to stay with Johnny and his family at Christmas time. After Allen died, the trips East became more infrequent and more difficult. Percy moved from her cottage in South Pasadena into a senior living facility in Pasadena, and then to a senior medical facility nearby. She died in December, 2005 at the age of 92 and is now buried alongside Allen at the Sims Family Cemetery in Sims Township, MI