Deceased February 21, 2023
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In Memory
Leland Stanford Evans Jr. of Rochester Hills, Mich., died on Feb. 21, 2023. Born in Detroit, Stan came to Amherst after graduating in 1949 from Detroit Country Day School. At Amherst, he was a good scholar with a broad range of interests, many of which stayed with him for years or led to others—individual sports like swimming, racquetball and golf, or collaborative activities like acting in theatricals. Stan majored in German, graduated cum laude and headed to Harvard Law School.
After graduating with his LLB in 1956, Stan served his required military tour of active duty as an attorney in the office of the judge advocate general at Fort Gordon, Ga. Then he returned to Detroit as a civilian and entered private practice with a downtown law firm. Ten years later, he left that firm and helped form a suburban firm in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., with emphasis on small business assistance, wills, trusts and estate planning. He was active in that firm until his death.
A man of many artistic talents, Stan belonged to the Rosedale Community Players for more than 50 years and played lead roles in many plays, including The Mousetrap, Arsenic and Old Lace, Twelve Angry Men and Proof.
Stan was predeceased by his wife of 45 years, Sharon Lee Evans. They were longtime residents of Bloomfield Hills. Stan will be greatly missed by his two children, Marjorie Killeen (Liam) and Jeremy Evans (Chris), and his four grandchildren, Nick, Emma, Andrea and Colin, as well as Sharon’s sons, Tom Berger (Terri) and Jim Adams-Berger (Sam), and their families.
Written principally by Marjorie Killeen, with additional recall from Stan’s classmates, flavored by Stan’s own words from the class of ’53’s 55th Reunion book