The Davis legacy

Among the many revealing things attendees learned about Fred Davis during the celebration of his life Tuesday (June 16) at the Lakeside Pavilion was that he spent much of his youth in a home for Jewish children in San Francisco.

Davis, who was Chico’s city manager for 33 years, from 1959-92, died April 23 at the age of 90. Needless to say, he had a profound impact on the city he loved. As Assemblyman James Gallagher put it, “Nobody contributed more to Chico than Fred Davis.”

The Lakeside Pavilion was filled to capacity with friends, dignitaries and former city employees who worked under Davis, including much of the current administration at City Hall and several council members.

The event was emceed by former Assemblyman Stan Statham, who noted that when he first decided to make the jump from being a news anchor at KHSL-TV to politics, he went to see Davis. Following their meeting, Davis became the first person to contribute to Statham’s campaign, writing him a check for $100.

The job of telling Davis’ life story fell to George Walker, Davis’ longtime friend after whom the Salvation Army’s George Walker Rehabilitation Center in Chico is named. He described how, when Davis’ parents came to this country from Poland in the 1930s, a processing official at Ellis Island couldn’t pronounce their name and changed it to Davis.

Davis’ father had served in World War I and been injured by mustard gas. He worked in San Francisco as a tailor, but because of his disability couldn’t earn enough to support his family, which is why Davis was put in the home for children.

The young man did well at Balboa High School and afterward joined the Army Air Corps, where he was trained as a pilot-navigator. During World War II he flew bombing missions over Europe, rising to the rank of major.

Following the war, he studied civil engineering at UC Berkeley, and in 1949 he married Elaine Kramer. They moved to Chico in 1953, when he was hired as the city’s public works director, a post he held for six years, until being promoted to city manager. They had two daughters, Debbie and Leslie. Elaine died in 1969. Davis married Joyce Iverson three years later; she died in 2001.

Much was made of the family’s cabin at Lake Almanor, and it was well-known that Davis loved to get away to the lake whenever he could. Several speakers talked of Davis’ love of family, and especially his daughters.

But it was Davis’ work as city manager that most people remembered. He was an institution, an icon, and he knew it. Walker described him as a “benevolent dictator,” and Statham spoke of his ability to manipulate the council.

City managers get their way with councils by controlling the flow of information. Davis’ favorite words directed to the council, Statham said, were, “‘As you know.’ If they say they don’t know, they look stupid.”

On the other hand, Davis was a good, if punctilious, boss. Sharon Nichols, who worked for the city in several capacities from 1973-88, said he “instilled a love of the city and city properties” in everyone at City Hall.

And he was a good listener, Nichols said: “We all felt like we had a complete open door to his office.”

He was a perfectionist and demanded the same of others, she added. For example, he forbade the use of paper clips, saying they had a way of causing the pieces of paper next to them to get clipped accidentally and thus lost. Use staples, he insisted.

He also expected employees to put in a full day of work. Once, Nichols said, when Davis was on a trip to London, he called the office at 4:55 p.m. Chico time “to make sure everybody was still there.”

Davis was most proud of creating The Esplanade as the beautiful boulevard it is today, Walker said. At the time it was part of Highway 99, and had to be designed to accommodate heavy traffic even as it maintained the beauty of the streetscape. (See “Model roadway,” CN&R May 3, 2007, for details.)

He remained busy after retirement. He had a consultancy firm for many years, served as a rent-a-manager in several jurisdictions, and wrote a blog called “Debunking the bunk” that contained all the bluntness people had come to expect from him.

Jim Stevens, principal of Northstar Engineering, told a terrific story. A billionaire industrialist from Holland was in town, and Stevens invited a dozen or so people, including Davis, to meet him. When they went around the room introducing themselves, the Dutch man mentioned the village he’d grown up in.

Davis was next. “I believe I bombed it,” he said.