Dave Davis: The Flying Cowboy

BROKEN BOW, Neb. — There are no secrets with Dave Davis.

He freely tells his story. A natural-born auctioneer. Made a lot of money. Started drinking with the big boys. Ended up living in a cardboard box behind a laundromat in Cleveland, Ohio.

“I went clear down the tube,'' he said.

Davis climbed out in 1981 when he took his last drink.

Davis was on his way from Hastings College — where he beat a classmate named Tom Osborne for class president — to medical school when his father had a heart attack in the late 1950s. Davis came back to the ranch to help awhile.

“Well, guess what? Never did go back,'' he said.

When Craig Savoye's “Nebraska Stories'' stalled, Wayne Jenkins' sons Stuart and Jim sent him to talk to Davis, now a successful Broken Bow real estate broker. Davis' stories recharged Savoye's project.

Davis, 73, told Savoye about buying a helicopter from a salesman on an adjacent bar stool and flying it without a license. Drunken, mostly.

He'd fly from ranch to ranch to check cattle. He'd hover over friends combining corn or his mother's church on Sunday. One night he landed behind his house, forgetting about a radio tower with guy wires and power lines in the airspace. Somehow he missed it all.

The next morning he discovered his resting main rotor blades inches away from guy wires. It took a flatbed truck with a winch to haul the copter away.

At the Legion Club in York, Neb., Davis once was mistaken for world champion saddle bronc rider Shawn Davis, who would be inducted into a hall of fame over the weekend at the Ak-Sar-Ben Rodeo in Omaha.

Before the night was over, Davis posed for pictures, set a record auctioning cakes for the Ladies Auxiliary and invited everyone to stop at Shawn Davis' ranch in Montana for world-class trout fishing.

You can imagine Davey's finances got all wrapped around a wagon wheel back then. A lawyer told him it'd be best to declare bankruptcy, but he wouldn't do it. After a few years back in Broken Bow, he finally called a friend and told him he was ready to pay off a debt with interest from the '60s. Feller said he always knew he'd get that call from Davey one day. Davey wrote a check for $56,216 and a few cents.

That was Davey, see. Even in his drinking days when he done some crazy things, he never cheated a man. ...

Couple years ago, Davey won an award from the Elks for citizen of the year in Broken Bow. Deserved it. Come a long way back from living in a Goodwill box in Cleveland.

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