The Roanoke Times from Roanoke, Virginia • 76

E--12 Roanoke Times -News, Sunday, November 21, 1982 Respect From Page E-1 she said that if she heard her husband tell a worn out joke one more time, she was going to throw up. The Washington Post printed the quote. "I really try to tell the truth." said Martha Davis, age none-ofyour-business. "Sometimes, it hurts. When I said 'throw up' in The Post, (Republican Senate candidate Paul) Trible held it up everywhere I he went.

I wanted to beat him on the head with it." Her one-liners and acerbic asides are legendary. "She has the most unusual sense of humor I've ever found," her husband said. "I'm more at ease in dialogue with her than with anyone I've ever met." Martha Davis does that to people. She makes them relax, draws them out, brings them to life. "People who have a good outlook live longer," she explained.

"You can depress yourself right into the grave." So she laughs at herself and encourages everyone else to laugh with her. She describes her pregnancy with son Richard J. Davis III, now 13, as follows: "We were the oldest people in the maternity ward. It was wonderful. I gained 60 pounds and couldn't walk.

I ate Mexican food six times a week. I had so much garlic on my breath the doctor said I should wear a mask." Before a recent campaign speech, she confessed to the audience: "I don't speak well, but I speak loud." When her husband served as mayor of Portsmouth, Martha Davis would cheerfully pass along the private phone of city councilmen to disgruntled constituents. "If you couldn't get results, you could call me back, and I'd give you another number," she said. She jokes about everything, even the cancer from which she is "not home," she said of her two cancer operations. "I had champagne in my closet.

We had shrimp brought in. A doctor I know brought in 50 chocolate eclairs. We gave 'em to everybody in the operating room. I believe in buttering them up." If her humor seems to know no limits, neither does her enthusiasm. "You can usually pick her out of the crowd when her husband is speaking just by listening to the applause and the hoots of support," said Eva Tiegg, who has worked with Richard Davis since he became mayor of Portsmouth.

Even in this subordinate role, Martha Davis sometimes gets carried away. "The thing that annoys my husband the most is that I'll interrupt him during a speech and he'll lose his train of thought. I've tried to stop it, but I can't. That's just my way." She is an imposing figure, a full-bodied woman with teased white hair, burning blue eyes and a set of lungs, which, by her own admission, need little or no amplification. She owns part of Television Corporation of Virginia, which oper- Staff file photo Richard and Martha Davis acknowledge June Roanoke convention crowd after his nomination as U.S.

Senate candidate ates Channel 33 in Tidewater and Channel 35 in Richmond. In addition, she serves as a director of her husband's business, Virginia Investment Mortgage Corporation. "She is definitely a partner in Dick's personal and business life. She's very active in business," said Gene Loving, board chairman of Television Corporation of Virginia, who has worked with Martha Davis in several broadcasting ventures. In public, she is perpetually restless.

She greeted defeat on election night, bouncing on the balls of her feet, waving and winking at people in the crowd at Democratic headquarters. Long after her husband, accompanied by the governor and his wife, had pushed through the gaggle of well-wishers beside the podium, Martha Davis hugged friends and traded quips. She did not care to spend the evening wearing the maudlin emotional veil of a loser. The intensity spills over into her relationships with complete strangers. During a campaign swing she met an old woman in the Baptist Home in Culpeper.

"No one has visited me i in nine years," the woman told her. "Will you write to me?" Martha Davis is still spreading that lady's name and address. She has given it to church groups and women's clubs. "Anyone who wants to get written to, I'll make sure they get mail, even if I have to put them on junk mail lists." She was alone a lot as a child. Born i in Norfolk, she was raised by aunts and uncles in Northern Virginia and North Carolina.

During the school year she lived outside Washington, with one set of relatives, during the summer with another in Hamilton, N.C. Her parents were SAVE UP TO during our mrhein's 61st SALE Anniversary Jewelers CHAMPAGNE Tell her you would marry her all over again with an "Anniversary Ring" from Amrhein's. We have a wide range of styles to select from. The Sparkle of Diamonds Remain Long After the Bubbles Are Gone Cave Spring Corners West Salem Plaza 989-7100 387-3816 "We're so much alike we fight all divorced. She never planned to marry.

At 15, while in high school, Martha Davis started working. She wanted to go to college, but there was no way her family could afford it. When she graduated, she went instead to what she calls "a finishing school" in Washington, where she learned "the right things to do and say." After that she migrated to New York and decorated windows in a department store. like New York," she said. "I kept coming back to Virginia.

I met a young man, a lawyer with the Justice Department. We became engaged. I bought the trousseau. Then I gave him back the In the early 1960s she returned to Norfolk and took over The Wig Shop on Granby Street. The business was failing when she got it.

"I got a loan at Bank of Virginia to pay off the debts. I owed $5,000 to an advertising agency. I offered them 50 cents on the dollar, but they said no. I guess they could see I would pay it all off. Each month I'd send them my check, and each month I'd write on it: 'Blood from the About the same time, she met Richard Davis, whose first marriage, to the daughter of a wealthy Portsmouth contractor, had ended in divorce.

He was a successful lawyer and mortgage banker who smoked a pipe and wore buttondown blue shirts with monograms. Initially, he rubbed her the wrong felt like I was fairly successful," she said. "He felt like he was fairly successful. I was not interested in marrying, particularly a man who had been married before. "I was pretty self-sufficient.

Marriage in the old days was the only thing to do. You found yourself a flier and got married. I didn't want to do that." Nevertheless, a friendship blossomed. "The longer we knew each other," Richard Davis said, "the more we were willing to subordinate our independence. That's when infatuation turns into love." They ran into each other once at the Plaza in New York, each in town on different business.

She wanted him to take her into the hotel's Oak Room, where women could not go unescorted. "He hadn't shaved," Martha Davis recalled. "'He went upstairs, cut a huge chunk out of his lip and came down with a Band-Aid on. Every time we tried to talk he would bleed." There were other episodes in the courtship. "I hated to cook," she said.

"He couldn't understand why there was never anything but a jar of olives in the refrigerator. He'd come to my apartment and the table would be set, but I wouldn't cook. I now have 50 cookbooks. Duck a l'orange. That's my big dish.

He hates it. He likes fried chicken. I still can't fry chicken." Their two-year engagement "up and down," according to Davis. His wife more bluntly: "I gave him the ring back three times." They married Nov. 29, 1967, at the winter baseball meetings in CHASE THE CHILLS IN A COAT $8999 Regularly $116.

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I had a company. He had a company. It looked like we were merging Bethlehem Steel." Later, in Portsmouth, there was a more traditional service. The biggest part of her life is taken up by her children, Richard, 13 and Ashley, 11. She smothers them sometimes, overcompensating for the nurturing she missed.

She and her husband wanted badly to have a baby. At the news of his wife's pregnancy, Richard Davis got so excited he signed the wrong line on his income tax return and had to send it back to his accountant. "When the baby was born, they brought him to us in a little buttondown blue shirt with initials on it and a little pipe," said Martha Davis. Her husband had promised her a diamond ring, one carat per pound. "Richard weighed 9 pounds, and his father reneged on the deal.

He did give me a very expensive ring. If I'm still alive when my son gets married, I'd like to give it to Ashley was adopted when she was 5 days old. "She will probably be the first woman president," her mother said. the time." But the squabbling is overlaid with love. There is nothing Martha Davis won't do for her daughter or her son and nothing she won't do with them.

"They say I'm very good with children and old people," she explained. "I don't do well with people 25 to 40. I try to see things through children's eyes. I love the circus; I love the ice shows; I have a season ticket to Busch Gardens." Every March she organizes a special kite-flying day. Twice a month, she passes out balloons to children in the hospital.

And of course, there is Halloween; in years past Martha Davis has appeared as a clown, Raggedy Andy and most recently, Daddy Warbucks. "I didn't have much childhood," she said. "Maybe that's why I'm still having one now." Or perhaps she acts as she does because she knows how ephemeral life can be. The discovery of the breast tumor in 1979 came as a shock. "I wanted to go out and smoke and drink and do all those things I had missed," she said.

When the surgeon operated to remove her breast, he discovered the cancer had already spread to other parts of her body. There was another exploratory operation. Each time she entered DePaul Hospital, a priest would administer rites for the sick. The nuns would place white flowers in the chapel and pray. And Martha Davis would lie in her bed and think about death.

"They told me to get my things in order," she said. "I really thought I was going to die." She still wonders what's going to happen to her children. Like almost everything in her life, she talks freely about dying. "Everything's planned. I'm having a big party with a life-size angel." For three years she has been treated for cancer eight weeks of cobalt treatments and since then, chemotherapy.

"You don't have to take the chemotherapy," she said. "A lot of times I've wanted to stop. You have to buy the drugs and take them to the doctor. Mentally, you better be right." Martha Davis has developed that mental toughness. She reads about cancer and talks publicly about her situation.

"I think I've handled it as well as you can handle this condition," she said. "'That comes from whatever stock I come from, and that's pretty sturdy." Her husband, whose father died of cancer in a house where the disease was never mentioned, agrees: "In this fight with cancer she has shown more courage than anyone I've ever met." "11 SAYS THEY'LL APPROVE A HOMEOWNER LOAN UP 10 $25,000 IN JUST A MATTER OF DAYS!" With us, you don't have to wait weeks for a loan committee to meet. We can give you the approval you want in just a matter of days even on very large amounts. HOW DO YOU APPLY? Just phone. When you see for yourself how fast we say "yes," you'll wonder why you waited so long! Call today! Competitive rates.

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