WWHS ALUMNI PAGE

Richard Harrison Davis ('58)

By GABRIELLE BANKS

This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette On-Line Edition on March 12, 2007.

Richard H. Davis took his seat at the family dinner table each night in a dress shirt and tie, and educated his sons about justice.

"My brother and I would sit on either side of him. He'd ask about school. Then we would have long discussions, tutorials, about labor, government, politics and civil rights," said Richard A. Davis, of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

"I knew the Bill of Rights and the Preamble to the Constitution by the time I was 8," he said.

As international vice president of the United Steelworkers union, Mr. Davis taught thousands of workers the same core values.

"Dick's view was that we had to expand the ability of our membership to participate both in their union and the broader society," said the union's international president, Leo W. Gerard. He considered his longtime colleague a "fountain of good wisdom and sound advice."

"He fought hard for the government and for companies to assume their social responsibility and provide the best that they could for workers and in the same breath he would say workers needed to give the best that they possibly could," his son said.

Mr. Davis, who lived for years in Bethel Park and later in McDonald, Washington County, died of lung cancer Friday. He was 66 and lived in Venice, Fla., with his wife Kay.

He was born in Lynch, Ky. His family relocated to Beckley, W.Va., where his father, Reid, was district director for the United Mine Workers. Mr. Davis studied business administration at Concord University and soon followed in his father's footsteps, beginning with the Allied Technical Workers until that union merged with the steel workers union.

He moved through the ranks, relocating his family for various campaigns to Richmond and Roanoke, Va., Washington, D.C., Columbia, S.C., Chattanooga, Tenn., Birmingham, Ala., and Pittsburgh. He thought he had the best job in the world, said Kay Davis, his wife of 46 years.

"He was just generally concerned over the plight of the worker, to make sure they had good wages, a safe workplace and health benefits. He was appalled at our health industry, how incomplete it was and how financially devastating it was to companies," she said.

He never forgot the day two strikers were killed trying to stop a truck at a processing plant in Birmingham.

As international vice president for the union, he developed leadership and education programs. He oversaw union representation for aluminum workers and orchestrated a complicated merger with the rubber workers, which brought more than 100,000 new members into the ranks in 1995, Mr. Gerard said.

"He was very respected for his negotiating skills at the bargaining table among the most recalcitrant employers, but he was also very elegant in his relationship with workers. He had a sense of direction and had a good moral compass," said union spokesman Gary Hubbard, who worked with Mr. Davis for decades.

He was close with a lord in the Houses of Parliament "but was just as comfortable with a boilermaker, steel worker or a rubber worker," his wife said.

The lifelong Democrat marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s and decades later met another hero, Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa, at an AFL-CIO convention in Miami Beach.

These men came up in dinner table conversation, but the longtime Steelers season ticket-holder often switched gears and extolled the virtues of Chuck Noll.

He told his sons how to throw the perfect cross-body block in football or why the left jab sets up the right hook in boxing.

He wanted his sons and everyone who crossed his path to be tough and do their part to make the world more just.

In addition to his wife and son, he is survived by another son, Robert H. Davis, of San Luis Obispo, Calif.; his sister Brenda Miller, of Charleston, W.Va.; his brother Jim Davis, of Orange Park, Fla.; and four grandchildren.

Visitation is today at 2 p.m. followed by "a celebration of life" at 3 p.m. at Farley Funeral Home in Venice, Fla.

Donations may be made to the American Cancer Society, 2801 Fruitville Road, Suite 250, Sarasota, FL 34237.