Phil Davis
| Phil Marquis Davis | |
| Biographical information | |
| Born: | March 04, 1906 |
|---|---|
| Died: | Desember 16, 1964 |
| Nationality: |  American
|
| Occupation: | Artist |
| Website: | N/A |
Life and career
Phil Marquis Davis was born in 1906 in Saint Louis, Missouri. His father was Charles Henry Davis and his mother was Ethel Herchenrath Davis. He spent a happy childhood with his older brother Hugo (b.1903) and his baby sister Emily (b. 1908).
At the age of 6 he got deeply interested in drawings: "I had a mania for parades”, he says. “I drew every parade I could see. My family neither encouraged nor discouraged me; they just went along and accepted my dark fate."
During a summer vacation when he was 12 years old - that was during the first World War - he got a job as a tool boy in the Liberty Motors plant. There he met Franz Berger, who used to be captain of Purdue University's baseball and football teams. Berger was a mechanical engineering professor at Washington University - also doing a war job during the summer - and he encouraged Phil to take a manual training course at high school. Phil did, with every hope of becoming an engineer.
When he graduated from Soldan High School, his family was in financial trouble, and he had to get a job right away. Because of his training in mechanical drawing he was able to work in the technical department of a telephone company as a draftsman.
Then young Davis hit a series of bad luck streaks. He'd been sick in the flu epidemic, and had a form of sleeping sickness as an after-effect. The phone company had to transfer him to outside work - switch-board installation - but the continuing effects of the sleeping sickness made him undependable and he was laid off.
Phil tinkered with radio and got a first-class ham license (9 EDD). He took night-school courses in trigonometry and drafting, and finally hooked up with a civil engineering firm, where his lettering work was very much admired. One day the head draftsman said, "Why don't you try commercial lettering? There's a lot of money in that!"
Phil took a Y.M.C.A. course in showcard lettering, and bought all the books on the subject that he could find. His first commercial art work appeared in "St. Louis Post Dispatch" in 1928.
Through a series of small art jobs as a free lance artist (spending the night at Washington University art school, studying figure painting and illustration), he finally landed in a advertising agency who calling themselves The Illustrators Inc. The agency was in the 12.th floor in the Louderman Building, where several commercial artists rented a studio together. With Al Parker as the main illustrator.
Shortly after US Liberty Magazine printed a Phil Davis cover for the September 1933 issue a young man named Lee Falk came walking into his office.