Evan Jenkins

Late one night, Upper Gwynedd resident Evan Jenkins got the call.The King of Saudi Arabia had died and Jenkins needed to be at Edwards Air Force Base by 1:30 a.m. with a suit case.
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Jenkins, who now serves as director of corporate security at Rohm and Haas, has lead an incredible life doing everything from trailing the vice president,s cigarette boat, to tracking international counterfeiting rings in a little-known branch of the Secret Service.

Recently appointed as an alternate to Upper Gwynedd,s civil service commission, Jenkins brings with him a life,s worth of high profile security work and protection.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Jenkins graduated from Olney High School and served as an Air Force mechanic in Guam during the Vietnam War.

After majoring in business at Delaware Valley College of Science and Agriculture, Jenkins thought of applying for a police job, but set his sights on the Secret Service instead.

His timing wasn,t good though , in 1972 President Nixon froze federal hiring except for the Internal Revenue Service.So Jenkins tried the IRS.

,After two years I just couldn,t stand it anymore,, he said. ,I mean sitting doing tax forms just drove me nuts.,

By then, however, the Secret Service was hiring again, and Jenkins got assigned to look into counterfeiting.The Secret Service, said Jenkins, is a lot more like the IRS than people think.

Formed in 1865, ,it wasn,t created for protecting people , it was created to protect currency,, one third of which was counterfeit at the time, said Jenkins.

That,s how Jenkins ended up on a squad that tracked a practically foolproof note from Thailand to Hong Kong, finally arresting a man who made $100 bills one at a time on a wine press.

,It was incredible,, Jenkins said. ,He was like an artist.,

Not that every assignment was as interesting.

For a while, Jenkins kept President Carter,s 2-year-old grandson safe.

,It was the worst thing that you could assign a grown man to do,, he said.

To make sure no one else was doing surveillance, Jenkins and other agents spent their days in the nursery school lobby.

In 1990, Jenkins and his wife came back to the area so his two children would know their grandparents.It was then he moved on to corporate security.

Still, Jenkins is happy to talk about the time he spent with former President Bush.

Jenkins said he had a sense of humor.

So what kind of jokes did the 41st president tell?

None that were appropriate for a newspaper, Jenkins said with a laugh.