His Honor, the Buckaroo

John Leslie Davie was born on June 24, 1850, in Saratoga County, New York, where he grew up near the Carpentier family—a detail of some irony, as it was Horace Carpentier who would become Oakland's first mayor and infamously sign away the city's entire waterfront. Too young to fight in the Civil War, the teenage Davie took work as a mule driver on the Erie Canal, laboring alongside deserters, criminals, and other hardened men of that rough era.

It was a brutal education for a young man, but one that forged the stubborn, combative character that would later define his political life. The Canal was a school of hard knocks in the most literal sense, and Davie emerged from it with a constitution of iron and a vocabulary that Sacramento police officers would one day describe as "too foul to repeat in print."

Davie eventually made his way to Chicago, where he was studying law when the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 upended his plans entirely. With his prospects reduced to ashes, he headed west—first to Nevada, where he worked as a ranch hand, and then onward to San Francisco, arriving in 1876 to begin what would become one of the most varied and improbable careers in California history.

The list of occupations John Davie held during his years in California reads like a casting call for a particularly ambitious picaresque novel. In San Francisco, he performed as a tenor on the stages of the city's great opera houses. He tried his hand at acting. He worked as a butcher. He was a rancher, turning the Lassen County desert into prime cattle land. He was an inventor. And he searched for gold from the Trinity Alps all the way down to Mexico.

In the late 1880s, Davie moved across the bay to Oakland, where he opened a hay, coal, and feed business at 970 Washington Street. Next door, he opened a bookstore—and it was there, among the stacks, that he found himself in the company of some of California's finest literary minds: the poet Ina Coolbrith, the adventurer Joaquin Miller, and a scrappy young writer named Jack London.

In 1892, tragedy struck. His wife Ada died while pregnant with twins, leaving John the single father of three young boys. He would credit the women of the Order of the Eastern Star, a women's auxiliary of the Masons, with helping him survive this devastating period. For the rest of his life, Davie wore a red carnation in his lapel—Ada's favorite flower—a silent, daily tribute that became his most recognizable trademark.

The Southern Pacific Railroad—known to its many enemies as "The Octopus"—held a stranglehold on Oakland's waterfront, controlling all shipping, ferry service, and commerce along the shore. It was a monopoly so complete that the railroad had effectively built a fence around the city. John Davie decided to tear it down.

The confrontation began when Davie constructed a wharf to serve his feed business, directly challenging the railroad's claim to the waterfront. He then launched his own ferry service—the only competition to the railroad's boats—setting fares so low they became known as the "Nickel Ferries." The railroad fought back with every tool at its disposal. Its slower ferries zigzagged in front of Davie's boats in the estuary. Its bridge tenders refused to open the railroad bridges when Davie's ferries signaled for passage.

Davie's response was characteristically direct: after consulting with a maritime attorney, he rammed and sank a railroad ferry that was blocking his way. He also physically pulled down the Webster Street and Fruitvale Avenue railroad bridges when they would not open for his boats. He was never indicted for any of it.

After retiring in 1931, Davie moved to the Hotel Oakland, where he continued to "hold court" in the lobby, dapper as ever, red carnation in his lapel. He would walk from the hotel to Lake Merritt for his regular rowing sessions—a habit he maintained well into his eighties. Visitors and old friends could find him there, dispensing opinions on city affairs with the same force of personality that had won him five elections.

He died on February 2, 1934, at the age of 83. In a career that spanned mule skinning, opera singing, railroad battling, and two decades of civic leadership, John L. Davie had shaped Oakland's physical and institutional infrastructure in ways that persist to this day. The Port of Oakland, EBMUD, the airport, Lake Merritt's improvements, the Posey Tube, Skyline Boulevard—all bear the imprint of his administration.

And yet, as the Oakland LocalWiki notes with some bemusement, despite all these accomplishments, the Davie family name appears on only one Oakland landmark: the Davie Tennis Stadium, a set of courts on land he donated "for the children of the East Bay" in 1931, built by the WPA in 1936. The stadium sits entirely within the city limits of Piedmont—itself entirely within the city limits of Oakland—because Davie was never one to respect boundaries.