Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Shareholder Activist Evelyn Y. Davis Dies
NOV 8, 4:02 PM
For Decades, This Woman Has Had D.C.’s Best Grave. She Died This Week
Rachel Kurzius
The District is filled with august memorials to dead men. But for decades, the city’s very best grave was built for a woman who was very much alive. ... Prominent shareholder activist Evelyn Y. Davis has owned a plot near the front gates of the historic St. Paul’s Rock Creek Cemetery since 1981. The headstones, which she started adding six years later, proclaim Davis the “Queen of the Corporate Jungle.”
The biggest of the granite slates reads more like a curriculum vitae than a typical grave, listing her college degrees, professional accolades, and divorces. The first two divorces were etched into the pink granite from the outset, and she later added her third and fourth divorces in smaller font. (One of her former husbands is also buried at the plot, listed only as Davis’ ex.)
“Every now and again, I’ll ask the stonecutter to carve in a new detail,” she told The Washington Post in 1995. “Rather than leave the design to my estate, I do it myself. That way I get what I want.”
Now, the stonecutter will have another job to do. Even though Davis’ grave proclaims that her life spanned from “1929 — FOREVER,” she died on November 4. According to the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation, she passed peacefully at Washington Medical Center.
....
A view of the main headstones for Evelyn Y. Davis.
Tyrone Turner / DCist
For Decades, This Woman Has Had D.C.’s Best Grave. She Died This Week
Rachel Kurzius
The District is filled with august memorials to dead men. But for decades, the city’s very best grave was built for a woman who was very much alive. ... Prominent shareholder activist Evelyn Y. Davis has owned a plot near the front gates of the historic St. Paul’s Rock Creek Cemetery since 1981. The headstones, which she started adding six years later, proclaim Davis the “Queen of the Corporate Jungle.”
The biggest of the granite slates reads more like a curriculum vitae than a typical grave, listing her college degrees, professional accolades, and divorces. The first two divorces were etched into the pink granite from the outset, and she later added her third and fourth divorces in smaller font. (One of her former husbands is also buried at the plot, listed only as Davis’ ex.)
“Every now and again, I’ll ask the stonecutter to carve in a new detail,” she told The Washington Post in 1995. “Rather than leave the design to my estate, I do it myself. That way I get what I want.”
Now, the stonecutter will have another job to do. Even though Davis’ grave proclaims that her life spanned from “1929 — FOREVER,” she died on November 4. According to the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation, she passed peacefully at Washington Medical Center.
....
A view of the main headstones for Evelyn Y. Davis.
Tyrone Turner / DCist
On Leadership • Analysis
RIP, Evelyn Y. Davis: An irrepressible shareholder activist for the ages
By Jena McGregor
November 8 at 6:57 PM
At an annual shareholder meeting in 1990s for a major airline, Nell Minow remembers encountering Evelyn Y. Davis, the flamboyant corporate gadfly who died last Sunday at age 89 after decades as a theatrical but persistent thorn in the side of corporate executives. ... “She was arguing with the staff there, and she felt very strongly that the mic for the Q&A session should be closer to her seat,” recalled Minow, a longtime shareholder advocate and adviser on corporate governance issues. Not only that, but “she wanted the CEO to move it personally,” she said. “And he did.”
The story is classic Davis, the Dutch American investor, Holocaust survivor, shareholder activist and publisher of an annual newsletter -- “Highlights and Lowlights of Annual Meetings” -- that secured her a White House press pass. She filed resolutions at many public corporations over the decades, and would show up at annual meetings not only to cajole and urge the board toward better corporate governance but at times, to flirt with the chief executive, and seemingly always, to draw attention to herself.
She told JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in 2010 that “you have to stay here forever,” wore a bathing suit in a 1970 General Motors meeting and, according to Automotive News, told former Ford CEO Alan Mulally that although he wasn’t bad-looking, “you should go back to Boeing, and we should have my king, Bill Ford, come back and be chairman and CEO again.”
[The stock character: A profile of Evelyn Y. Davis]
In 2003, Bill Ford had personally delivered the keys to her new Jaguar to the Watergate complex in Washington where she lived. After, she said, “this is my secret, manipulating the male ego, playing one against the other," Bloomberg reported. ... A gravestone she had installed years ago at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington reads “Queen of the Corporate Jungle," and “I did not get where I am by standing in line, nor by being shy.” When The Washington Post profiled her in 2003, she suggested her own headline: “I Was Gifted With Both Extraordinary Beauty and Extraordinary Brains and I’ve Used Them Both to My Utmost Advantage.”
....
The tombstone that Evelyn Y. Davis commissioned for herself. (Courtland Milloy/ The Washington Post)
....
Jena McGregor writes on leadership issues in the headlines – corporate management and governance, workplace trends and the personalities who run Washington and business. Prior to writing for the Washington Post, she was an associate editor for BusinessWeek and Fast Company magazines and began her journalism career as a reporter at Smart Money. Follow https://twitter.com/jenamcgregor
RIP, Evelyn Y. Davis: An irrepressible shareholder activist for the ages
By Jena McGregor
November 8 at 6:57 PM
At an annual shareholder meeting in 1990s for a major airline, Nell Minow remembers encountering Evelyn Y. Davis, the flamboyant corporate gadfly who died last Sunday at age 89 after decades as a theatrical but persistent thorn in the side of corporate executives. ... “She was arguing with the staff there, and she felt very strongly that the mic for the Q&A session should be closer to her seat,” recalled Minow, a longtime shareholder advocate and adviser on corporate governance issues. Not only that, but “she wanted the CEO to move it personally,” she said. “And he did.”
The story is classic Davis, the Dutch American investor, Holocaust survivor, shareholder activist and publisher of an annual newsletter -- “Highlights and Lowlights of Annual Meetings” -- that secured her a White House press pass. She filed resolutions at many public corporations over the decades, and would show up at annual meetings not only to cajole and urge the board toward better corporate governance but at times, to flirt with the chief executive, and seemingly always, to draw attention to herself.
She told JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in 2010 that “you have to stay here forever,” wore a bathing suit in a 1970 General Motors meeting and, according to Automotive News, told former Ford CEO Alan Mulally that although he wasn’t bad-looking, “you should go back to Boeing, and we should have my king, Bill Ford, come back and be chairman and CEO again.”
[The stock character: A profile of Evelyn Y. Davis]
In 2003, Bill Ford had personally delivered the keys to her new Jaguar to the Watergate complex in Washington where she lived. After, she said, “this is my secret, manipulating the male ego, playing one against the other," Bloomberg reported. ... A gravestone she had installed years ago at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington reads “Queen of the Corporate Jungle," and “I did not get where I am by standing in line, nor by being shy.” When The Washington Post profiled her in 2003, she suggested her own headline: “I Was Gifted With Both Extraordinary Beauty and Extraordinary Brains and I’ve Used Them Both to My Utmost Advantage.”
....
The tombstone that Evelyn Y. Davis commissioned for herself. (Courtland Milloy/ The Washington Post)
....
Jena McGregor writes on leadership issues in the headlines – corporate management and governance, workplace trends and the personalities who run Washington and business. Prior to writing for the Washington Post, she was an associate editor for BusinessWeek and Fast Company magazines and began her journalism career as a reporter at Smart Money. Follow https://twitter.com/jenamcgregor
WORLD | OBITUARIES
Evelyn Y. Davis Would Have Wanted a Bigger Headline on This Obituary
Shareholder activist never lost sight of her overriding goal: ‘keep my name out in front’
By James R. Hagerty
https://twitter.com/jamesrhagerty
Nov. 9, 2018 10:30 a.m. ET
As a defender of shareholder rights, Evelyn Y. Davis was moderately effective. ... In her parallel quest for publicity, she was in a league of her own.
For five decades, Ms. Davis attended scores of annual meetings every year to scold, cajole and sometimes flatter CEOs into submission. Some endured her tirades stoically. Others tried to appease her. Ford Motor Co.’s Bill Ford Jr. personally delivered the new car she ordered in 2003, a black Jaguar X-Type sedan.
Ms. Davis, who died Nov. 4 at the age of 89, advised Lee Iacocca of Chrysler Corp. to improve his diet and told Hugh McColl Jr. of NationsBank Corp. that her presence at his annual meeting proved he had made the big time. Though usually sheathed in stylish outfits, she arrived at one annual meeting in hot pants and at another in a swimming suit.
More than 30 years before she died, she had her own three-panel tombstone engraved. Among other things, the monument announces that her father was a prominent neurologist and that she was recognized at White House news conferences by several presidents. “Power is greater than love,” the memorial says, “and I did not get where I am by standing in line, nor by being shy.”
....
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob. hagerty@wsj.com
Evelyn Y. Davis Would Have Wanted a Bigger Headline on This Obituary
Shareholder activist never lost sight of her overriding goal: ‘keep my name out in front’
By James R. Hagerty
https://twitter.com/jamesrhagerty
Nov. 9, 2018 10:30 a.m. ET
As a defender of shareholder rights, Evelyn Y. Davis was moderately effective. ... In her parallel quest for publicity, she was in a league of her own.
For five decades, Ms. Davis attended scores of annual meetings every year to scold, cajole and sometimes flatter CEOs into submission. Some endured her tirades stoically. Others tried to appease her. Ford Motor Co.’s Bill Ford Jr. personally delivered the new car she ordered in 2003, a black Jaguar X-Type sedan.
Ms. Davis, who died Nov. 4 at the age of 89, advised Lee Iacocca of Chrysler Corp. to improve his diet and told Hugh McColl Jr. of NationsBank Corp. that her presence at his annual meeting proved he had made the big time. Though usually sheathed in stylish outfits, she arrived at one annual meeting in hot pants and at another in a swimming suit.
More than 30 years before she died, she had her own three-panel tombstone engraved. Among other things, the monument announces that her father was a prominent neurologist and that she was recognized at White House news conferences by several presidents. “Power is greater than love,” the memorial says, “and I did not get where I am by standing in line, nor by being shy.”
....
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob. hagerty@wsj.com