Before retirement, Davis (left) supervised public TV's American Playhouse and P.O.V. series. Afterwards, he returned to his first creative career. (Photo at right by Jack Dausend, Boaters' Enterprise, Trinidad.)
Obituary
David MacFarland Davis, 81, died almost four months ago in Guyana, but he had so thoroughly parted from his pioneering public TV career that most of his old coworkers didn’t hear until August.
The gentlemanly, self-contained TV exec helped start many public TV stations and production units as a Ford Foundation grantmaker and later oversaw the major PBS series American Playhouse and P.O.V. Then, 14 years ago, he began a radically different retirement in the Caribbean, where he and his second wife, Joyce, sailed from port to port in their boat, playing jazz and the blues in clubs. They performed in the Mood Indigo quartet and sextet. She sang and he, with long white hair, played trumpet.
Davis died May 23 at their home on the Essquibo River in Guyana, a onetime British colony perched on the South American coast between Venezuela and Brazil. This account reached old friends in a eulogy published in the July issue of The Boca, a Trinidad-based magazine.
In 1993, when Davis retired from Playhouse and P.O.V., “he’d set them up and made them healthy, remembers Lindsay Law, then his e.p. at Playhouse. Davis didn’t wait around for the planned retirement bash, Law said. “You can’t argue with the tide. The tide came in and he had to go.”
He and his new wife, were utterly gone to a new life on a sailboat. “He just disappeared,” said Ward Chamberlin, the TV exec who succeeded him as chief exec for the two New York-based series.
Though his broadcast career spanned three decades, from the earliest days through the spread of educational TV stations in the 1950s and the development of public TV’s major series in the 1980s, music stayed with him longer.
Growing up in Illinois, he began trumpet lessons at age 8 and joined the musicians union at 15 to play in a dance band, according to a bio for the Mood Indigo ensembles. He wrote and conducted music for radio dramas and got to know broadcasting.
Davis studied music education at Northwestern University and entered broadcasting after graduating in 1947, working at commercial stations in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., as well as public stations WKAR in East Lansing, Mich., and WUNC in Greensboro, N.C., according to the National Public Broadcasting Archives. He rose to TV station manager at Boston’s WGBH, where he produced the Oscar-winning doc Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World in 1963, as well as series on composers Aaron Copeland and Kurt Weill.
“He was quiet, decisive and rarely wrong when it came to matters of making programs,” wrote a WGBH colleague, producer Michael Ambrosino, on WGBH’s alumni website. “We all became more professional because of his presence.”
After a short stint in Israeli TV, he began a decade at the Ford Foundation in 1968, including three years assisting Fred Friendly as they spent some of Ford’s millions to jump-start public TV’s national program production and aid local groups launching public TV stations in numerous cities.
Davis returned to public TV in 1980 as president of Public Television Playhouse Inc., a four-station consortium formed to produce the PBS drama series.
“He was very self-effacing,” says Law, a Yale Drama School professor who was e.p. for more than 140 dramas for Playhouse in its six-year run. Davis “tended to try to make things possible for others.”
Davis came up with the notion of the consortium and recruited the key stations in New York, Los Angeles, Boston and South Carolina, which all wanted to produce drama, Law said. Then Davis insisted that Playhouse production money be allotted by the e.p. on the basis of merit and not simply divvied up to the four partners, Law says. “He made my life extremely easy by protecting me when necessary.”
In 1987, he helped independent doc advocates start P.O.V. Marc Weiss, first e.p. of P.O.V., writes that Davis persuaded stations in the Playhouse consortium to also operate the proposed doc series. “With their backing, doors began to open,” Weiss wrote on the series website. Davis took on the additional role of president of The American Documentary Inc., which produced P.O.V.
Through this period Davis also performed with a swing band in Connecticut.
A few colleagues from public TV had heard him perform. Ward Chamberlin recalls, “He was damn good."
Web page posted Sept. 24, 2007, photo added Oct. 9, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee
