The strange case of Evelyn Davis, the woman notorious for shareholder activism who has already created her own memorial
Any chief executives dreaming of the day when Evelyn Davis will no longer haunt them would probably get a giggle out of a field trip to Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC. There, Davis – though very much alive and still gadflying – has erected a memorial to herself.
For the unhaunted: Davis, currently 78 years old, made her name over the last five decades by showing up to shareholder meetings of Fortune 500 companies and dominating them. The New York Times reported in 1963 that Davis’ ceaseless questioning so outraged fellow attendees at IBM’s annual meeting that she needed to be assigned a bodyguard.
In 1979 she helped lead a shareholder revolt at Ford’s annual meeting, which ended with the announcement that chairman Henry Ford II would retire. People magazine has called her the US’ ‘most dreaded corporate gadfly’.
At some point years ago, Davis, a longtime DC resident, took a break from the rabble-rousing long enough to order a five-foot-tall, verbose headstone for herself. She placed it and other fixings traditionally reserved for dead people on a large plot near the main entrance of one of the most hightone cemeteries in her hometown.
The headstone features details of Davis’ education, employment and marital status. Though the bio was etched in stone, Davis went back and edited the personal data after her third divorce in 1994, and her fourth in 2006. And while epitaphs are typically chosen by survivors, Davis wrote several of her own, including: ‘Power is greater than love, and I did not get where I am by standing in line, nor by being shy.’ How true!
For visitors the memorial also includes a matching marble bench with her name and birth year on it.
Rock Creek Cemetery is located just across the street from Abraham Lincoln’s summer home, in the grounds of St Paul’s Episcopal Church, and has been accepting bodies since 1719. Among the cemetery’s VIP residents is Julius Garfinckel, founder of the departed department store chain Garfinckel’s.
In 1979 Davis was written up in the Washington Post for hectoring then-Garfinckel board chairman David Waters about what she viewed as the company’s excessive legal spending. So when Davis moves into this neighborhood, Garfinckel will probably roll over in his… well, you know.
