‘Everybody trusted Jack’

The life of attorney and philanthropist Jack Davis, one of Lansing’s most stalwart champions, gives the lie to the old saying, ‘It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”

With Davis, who died Thursday (May 28) at the age of 81 of acute myeloid leukemia, it was both.

He gave blunt advice, but tempered it with diplomacy. He donated generously to arts organizations while pushing them to grow. He moved quietly among the city’s political, business and cultural centers, cross-pollinating countless relationships and connections without drawing attention to himself.

“My heart is hurting but it’s also filled with joy,” former Lansing School Board member Robin Lewis said. Lewis met Davis while both were on Lansing’s middle-school task force. “I have many stories about seeing him use his privilege for good. I admired his integrity and what he stood for.”

Davis was a proud, home-grown product of Lansing schools. He got his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin, where he met his future wife, Sue Shaeffer. She and their children, Gregory and Jennifer, survive him. After a stint in the Army, he got a law degree at Harvard and worked briefly in Chicago, but returned to Lansing to join the Loomis Law Firm in 1966 and lived in Lansing the rest of his life.

It impressed former Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero that Davis served twice as president of the Lansing School Board.

“Very few people of his pedigree, his education level, go back to their community and serve on the school board Bernero said. “Not in the sense of, ‘You’re lucky I’m here,’ but pulling up alongside, doing the heavy lifting, shoulder to shoulder.”

Bernero knew Davis best as “the mayor whisperer.”

“He sort of comes with the office,” Bernero said. “He was an adviser to all the mayors, and to many others. If I had trouble getting through to somebody, they would always take Jack’s call even if they wouldn’t take mine.”

Bernero credited Davis with helping to bring the Lansing Economic Area Partnership, or LEAP, into being.

“Regional development was a foreign concept in Lansing,” he said.  “It was Jack’s quiet, diplomatic, persistent leadership that brought people together. When they didn’t trust each other, everybody trusted Jack.”

Longtime friend Pam Jodway, a marketing specialist, has known Davis her entire life. Davis served as personal and professional attorney for her parents, both physicians. Davis spoke at Jodway’s father’s funeral. She turned to Davis for professional, personal, legal and travel advice “countless times.”

“He’d just listen and say, ‘Do you need anything?’” she recalled. “He was always there for you.”

She watched Davis at board meetings as the complex machinery of the Lansing Promise scholarship fund took shape.

“His persistence in getting that first big donation from Magic Johnson took two years,” Jodway said.

It was easy to misread him at first blush, especially in a crowded meeting. Most of the time, he waited and listened, and sometimes seemed uninterested.

“We had some contentious, difficult conversations,” Jodway said. “He was in the background, observing, and he would find an appropriate time to quietly put something on the table that was so profound, it changed the whole tone of the meeting,” Jodway said.

His sense of humor was below the radar. During a long and complicated meeting, Davis would raise his eyebrows and whisper to Jodway, “Are you having fun yet?”

Michael H. Rhodes, a partner at the firm with Davis for 38 years, called Davis a “quiet mentor.”

“He wasn’t a fiery litigator, like some, but he was a true advocate for his clients.” Rhodes said.

JV Anderton was an associate at the Loomis firm for years before he became a partner.

“As an attorney, I don’t think I ever met anyone more thorough,” Anderton said. “What made him so brilliant and so incisive was the preparation, the hours and hours of time and thought that went into it.”

Cathy Morgan was a receptionist at the Loomis firm for about 11 years.

“I loved it. I met so many people through him,” she recalled.

Morgan said Davis treated everyone, from high-profile clients like football star Steve Smith to the entire Loomis staff, with the same respect.

“He was great for me because he knew I do a lot of things with the church, and he supported me in all that, even after I left,” Morgan said.

Former Lansing State Rep. Joan Bauer and Davis chaired the drive to invest $120 million in Lansing schools, a bond proposal that passed in 2016. True to form, Davis went beyond attending every meeting and public event.

“He even went out and did door-to-door stuff, gave his all to everything,” Bauer said. “I miss him already.”

The Davises enjoyed the arts for their own sake, but also for its potential to help a community grow and thrive. Courtney Millbrook, executive director of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra, said the Davises were among the orchestra’s most generous and stalwart donors. She got a taste of the blunt Davis style in one of their earliest meetings.

“At first, it can be a little off-putting, but then you really appreciate it,” Millbrook said. “Then you seek it out, because you know you’re going to get a straight answer. It comes from a great place and it will take you to a really great place.”

Millbrook choked back tears at the memory.

When it came to financial support, it was not just the amount Davis gave that had impact, but the way he gave it. His support often came in the form of challenge grants that encouraged arts groups to reach out to new donors.

“The support from Jack and Sue is really what has enabled the symphony to start to stand on our own two feet and be sustainable,” Millbrook said.

Many of the area’s nonprofit leaders and other business and cultural players owe their introduction to each other to the Davises.

“He felt strongly about the ecosystem of the arts, culture and service organizations,” Millbrook said. “When I think about the people I can call and talk things through, my peers, a lot of those introductions came from Jack.”

Davis always sponsored a table at the Allen Neighborhood Center’s Strawberry Festival, but he never used it for the Loomis firm. A few years ago, Millbrook got a call from the center’s director, Joan Nelson, offering Davis’ table to the symphony.

“That’s not something we normally would have done, but we got to come out and meet the people in the east side community.”

Two of Davis’ passions — his advocacy for education and his love of nature — converged in the Susan and Jack Davis Fenner Nature Center Pavilion, completed earlier this year, where the center will host hundreds of group meetings, community classes and programs for tens of thousands of Lansing area kids and adults.

The cultivation and cross-pollination of people from business, government, the arts and education harks back to the words “we must cultivate our garden,” from one of Davis’ favorite books, Voltaire’s “Candide.” Davis was also an avid book collector, favoring books that he felt “promoted and brought about change,” like Alex Haley’s “Roots” and Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” along with classics by Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Friends testify that Davis actually read the books, unlike many collectors.

Davis, who was comfortable financially, first sought to collect art — but realized on a buying trip to New York with East Lansing’s Roy Saper in tow as an adviser that he was out of his league. So he turned to books and autographs. A lucky few were accorded an opportunity to visit his collection, so valuable it was housed in a secret location away from his Okemos home.

People who worked with him or knew him as a friend wondered how he found enough hours in the day to do it all.

He was an avid athlete as well and completed the Lansing-to-Mackinac DALMAC bike many times, including last fall. He was out biking the week before his death, the cause of which has not been disclosed.

According to Bernero, the recent COVID-19 quarantine considerably cramped his style, even at 81 years old.

“He never complained about anything, an ache or a pain, and he must have had some,” Bernero said. “But he hated this stay-at-home thing, especially when the weather was cold and he couldn’t get on a bike.”

Jodway hoped Davis would be granted a full, long retirement, with plenty of time to enjoy his kids and grandkids and do the traveling he loved.

“I wanted him to get that time to relax, be off the circuit,” she said.

The community, for its part, has been denied the comfort of gathering to celebrate Davis’ life, but that day will come.

“They’re going to have to have an event somewhere that lets everybody in,” Jodway said. “You could fill Spartan Stadium with Jack’s advocates.”