P. O. Davis

"[2] Davis also recalled that while this tiny community lacked intellectual and cultural sophistication, it was a place where "people go to church, treat their neighbors right, tend to their own business and still believe God is for the living and the dead."

Recalling the incident more than 40 years later to then-Auburn University president Ralph Brown Draughon, Davis viewed the donation as practically meaningless, because it scarcely was enough to purchase the equipment to broadcast the signal, let alone to operate the station on a daily basis.

Unfortunately for Davis, the API administration, as well as his immediate supervisor, then-Alabama Extension Director Luther Duncan, fearing the bad publicity that would follow if they refused the donation, saw things differently.

Davis also was instrumental in working with agents to organize radio listening parties for audiences throughout the state — a practice that would foreshadow videoconferencing techniques common today.

[5] After repeated unsuccessful attempts to affiliate with a national network — NBC or CBS — Davis decided to move the station to Birmingham after securing a pledge from city officials to provide half of the annual operating costs, totaling approximately $20,000.

The arrangement with Birmingham and the other two institutions worked reasonably well, Davis recalls, until the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, after which the cash-strapped city was forced to renege on the deal.

"Some day, I hope a competent historian will dig up all of the facts and write much more in detail than I have about WAPI — a comprehensive history," Davis stated in the Draughon letter.

In an era when agriculture comprised a major pillar of the U.S. economy, many of Davis' staff people were in hot demand among farm-related publications, agencies and businesses.

[7] People who worked with Davis recall that he never overcame his editing proclivities even after he became Extension director, frequently correcting grammatical and syntactical lapses in reports and other documents.

[6] In the view of many, though, he was an extrovert, also blessed with considerable communicative and organizational skills — attributes which, coupled with a deep devotion to the Cooperative Extension mission, more than compensated for any shortcomings.

[6] As a result of his effective Extension leadership during the late Depression and through the war years, Davis emerged as a national agricultural leader and spokesman, which enabled him to influence the course of federal legislation throughout the Roosevelt years — in the view of some, a critical asset in an era when the federal government exerted an especially strong influence on farm policy.

Davis also was highly regarded as a public speaker, traveling throughout the South and through much of the nation sharing his views on the future of agriculture and Extension's evolving educational mission.

[9] Like many American educators of his era, Davis firmly believed in the transformative power of scientific progress, frequently expressing effusive pride in the role Cooperative Extension had played as a change agent in mechanizing Southern farming and rendering it more efficient and profitable.

"Together, we're engaged in the finest type of education anywhere and by any people," said Davis, in an address to the Association of County Commissioners and Probate Judges in Mobile, Alabama, in 1956.

Outlying offices also were provided with film-strip and stereopticon machines "so that each county worker may combine vision with sound in presenting facts at meetings."

[12] Davis respected the role science had played in the rapid advancement of southern agriculture, but his faith in scientific achievement and progress was qualified.

"[15] This Jeffersonian passion for farmers and small businessmen sentiment largely account for his intense interest in and sympathy for the Farm Bureau concept.

[17] For a time in the 1940s, there was a tug of war between Davis and Elbert H. Norton, state school superintendent, to succeed Luther Duncan, the API president, who had died unexpectedly in 1947.