LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Sitting in his hilltop house that overlooks Clear Lake, it would seem Steve Davis – 15 years into retirement from the California Highway Patrol – is a well-settled man. Don't be fooled, because in quite another context, his way is still the highway.
After three decades in pursuit of law-breaking drivers, Davis, along with wife Elizabeth, has for the last 20 years pursued his interests.
They are numerous.
To begin with, his travels have taken him to every state in the U.S., with the single exception of Rhode Island. He will also has traveled much of the world. This is the year for Barcelona for he and Elizabeth, who is a Realtor.
But other trips, these to disadvantaged locations, for Steve and Elizabeth have had a deeper significance that was far from recreational.
As devoted members of the Rotary International Lakeport Rotary Club over the past two decades – Steve Davis was the Rotary chair in 2008-09 and has long standing in the club's international project committee – the Davises have made missions of mercy at their own expense to:
... Guatemala, where as members of a Rotaplast team of doctors, nurses and volunteers, they aided in cleft palate deformity surgery for children. County Supervisor Rob Brown and Marty Diesman, also of Lake County, also were members of the team;
... Belize, to aid in the delivery of hospital equipment and supplies to a small rural hospital; and
... El Salvador, to outfit a clinic for patients undergoing radiation and chemotherapy.
“We (Rotary) are looking forward to doing something more for the hospital in Belize,” are said Davis, who, it was suggested, might have more enjoyed, say, a tropical vacation in Tahiti.
“That's not what I'm about,” he said.
The Guatemala and are trip, made 10 years ago, had the greatest impact on Davis, as it might anyone who has seen so many children with cleft deformities which, according to numerous sources, are “the silent scourge of most third-world countries.”
“It was a life-changing event,” Davis said of the 10 days of fast-paced surgery in Guatemala during which he aided in sterilizing surgical equipment while Elizabeth served in the recovery room.
The children, from a widespread area, he added, “got there any way they could – on the back of pickup trucks or rickety old buses. Some came on horses and mules.
“It was devastating to walk into a room with all those children and know that you can't help them all,” said Davis, shaking his head sadly over the recollection. “You just have to help certain ones, the worst 100 cases. At the end of the 10 days when all the children who had surgery came back for check ups it was moving to see all them (who previously had) horrible disfigurements look like they just fell off a bicycle. The surgeons were that good.”
The Lakeport Rotary Club-aided cancer clinic in El Salvador, which provided patients quarters that enabled them to stay near the hospital during treatment, was a critical project.
“Our Rotary club teamed up with a Rotary club in Ciudad and Merliot, El Salvador, which was where the cancer clinic was,” he added. “Without this clinic, patients would have had to go to and from their homes every day, which often meant riding 40 miles in the back of a pickup truck.
“On another project, we delivered two fetal heart monitors to a rural village in Belize on the Guatemalan border. They had a high incidence of infant mortality from not being able to monitor a child's heart rate,” Davis said.
“We had to smuggle the monitors into Belize in order to give them to the hospital in a little village. The problem was that medical supplies are so rare in places like Belize that if you tried to bring them in through the front door, so to speak, they would get circumvented to the larger hospital in Belize City,” he said.
The Lakeport Rotary has continued to aid the Belize hospital, Davis said, “by providing it with a whole truckload of surplus equipment,” including a portable x-ray machine donated by the Lake County Tribal Health Clinic.
“A desire to serve,” as Davis calls it, has been a motivation through much of his life, including becoming a CHP officer.
“You have to have that in the CHP ... There's a lot of demand for it,” he said. “You've got to want to help people.”
But also motivating him was his “lust for adventure” and Davis had those adventures in spades, beginning with several high-speed chases.
“The fastest was 143 miles per hour on an open freeway in Southern California,” he recalled. “It was somebody who had fixed up his car and wanted to see how fast it would go. The guy wasn't on anything and he wasn't reckless. When I finally stopped him, he said 'You got me!' He went to jail, of course.”
Davis downplays the chases and apprehension of individuals who were combative. Did he have to physically restrain some of them?
“Oh absolutely,” he said. “When you're working the night shift – especially graveyard – you're arresting people for drugs and alcohol and you're going to get into your share of scuffles. Some were only lightweight, but some were very physical.”
He was never seriously injured, he said. “Nothing that would cause me to lose some time, but everybody who has done law enforcement work has had chases and all those things.”
If Davis had his way, drive training in California would be much more extensive before licenses are issued.
“I think the written test is a joke. Your first driver's license test ought to be as hard to pass as it is an algebra test. You don't have to look too far to see drivers who shouldn't be driving.”
But, after making his share of stops, Davis doesn't feel that drivers resented him.
“Amazingly,” he said, “most of the time after I wrote somebody a ticket and walked away they said 'thank you.'”
Another of Davis' latest pursuits is his authoring of a book which he said dates to an idea he had 20 years ago.
The characters in his recently published whodunit, entitled “22E ... Officer Down,” are only composites. But the dangers faced down by CHP officers on a routine basis in his book are real enough.
“It was always a kind of a bucket list thing,” Davis, who is 68, said of his book. “I've met a few authors going through my life and career and I thought it might be a nice thing to kind of leave behind. I wanted to try to give the reader the feel that they were there during the whole time and were part of the case.”
Davis described his plot for a second book book he's writing, “Perfect Alibis.” “In this one you know who's doing the crime, but you're wondering if they're going to get away with it or not.”
Yet another of his pet projects is his prize-winning classic 1955 Chevy Bel Air, which has a long history in his family. When the two were teenagers, Steve's brother bought the car and rebuilt its blown engine.
“We used to drag race in it all over my hometown of Riverside. I bought a '55 Chevy convertible the same year,” he said. “His car was fixed up for hotrodding and mine was a cruiser. We used to drag race all over Riverside in his car and then go cruising in mine. We had the best of both worlds.”
After his brother died, Davis bought the car from his widow and last year showed it for the first time during the massive “Hot August Nights” classic car event in Reno.
“It was one of 6,000 vehicles entered and won 'best of show,'” he said proudly.
Indicative of the gypsy in his soul, Davis confides that the house overlooking Clear Lake is the first place he has ever lived for more than five years.
“I had considered going into police or sheriff work,” he said. “They have adventure, but a lot of their calls are very mundane and I wanted the freedom to go all over California.”
And essentially that's what he did, shifting locations a dozen times. Among areas in which he served were Riverside, San Bernardino, Eureka, Sacramento, Stockton, Oakland, Stockton again and finally Lake County, where he was assigned as area commander until his retirement.
He chose to spend his final years with the CHP in Lake County, essentially because he fell in love with the area.
“What's not to love about Clear Lake?” he questions. “You have this beautiful lake, the cleanest air in the United States and the weather's nice, though it gets a little hot for me in the summertime.”
Steve Davis' book, “22E Officer Down,” is available through www.amazon.com or by logging on to www.davismedia.us .
Email John Lindblom at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
