Evans obviously touched many lives with his work.

Greg Piper of the College Fix reports.

Honoring a luminary of the conservative college journalism movement

Vivian Hughbanks, a Hillsdale College student and our former intern at the Student Free Press Association, has written a short Townhall account from last Friday’s tribute to conservative college journalism pioneer M. Stanton Evans at the Heritage Foundation.

Evans flew under the radar if you weren’t in the weeds of conservative activism going back decades, but his tribute drew a full house at Heritage – many weepy when they weren’t laughing uproariously at anecdotes shared by Evans’ family, friends and colleagues.

Perhaps none celebrated the life of Evans, founder of the National Journalism Center, as eloquently as Ralph Kinney Bennett, former Washington editor of Reader’s Digest:

“He understood perfectly how daunting it is to have God’s gift of freedom — to be placed at risk in the universe, subject to its laws, physical and moral, and to the consequences of contravention or obedience.”

Evans brought Coca-Cola and cigarettes to morning meetings because, as Bennett quoted,  “‘My mother always told me that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.’”

And his quips were always sharp:

“Life in D.C. was a source of recurring heartburn for Stan,” Bennett continued. “Car impoundments, parking tickets, futile arguments with sundry bureaucrats and stolid code-enforcement officers, all prompted Stan to regard the District of Columbia as ‘The Soviet Union, but without the amenities.’”