Nonagenarian-in-waiting 'cut out for real estate' – The Kingston Whig-Standard

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They’ll be spinning stories 13 to the dozen at longtime local realtor Peter Davy’s upcoming 90th birthday bash, with the nonagenarian-in-waiting being the odds-on favourite to lead the tale-telling.

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Davy, who turns 90 two days after the Oct. 3 private party at Queen’s University Faculty Club, is the undisputed elder in the Limestone City real estate agents’ lodge. When Davy sold his first house, the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn, Ike was in the White House and Rocky Marciano was heavyweight champion. Along with Etobicoke’s Daniel Gargarella — the Methusula of agents in Canada who is “still knocking on doors” at age 97 — Davy stands among the industry’s longest practitioners.

He’s also well liked and respected by fellow members of his profession and the city’s business community at large, a gentleman salesman whose reputation was forged through ardent dedication, care and commitment.

“A lot of people pick wrong careers,” Kingston lawyer and longtime Davy friend Geraldine Tepper notes. “Not Peter. He was cut out for real estate. He’s considerate; he’s there at the beginning of a deal and he’s there through its completion and even afterwards. He’s a true professional.”

Davy’s a splendid storyteller with an endless supply of material, as yours truly discovered during a telephone conversation the other day. Which means he’s sure to get a decent verbal workout once someone, at some point during the aforementioned shindig at Queen’s, asks the guest of honour how he got started in the business. At that, Peter will be off and running. He’ll begin with his usual, “Now that’s an interesting story,” before relaying a wonderfully detailed anecdote of how in his early twenties he’d dismissed the idea of ever following in the footsteps of his father, Henry Mowat Davy, a successful Toronto realtor. In the next breath, before he goes further, he’ll proudly point out that his father was born in the kitchen of the Davy homestead, which predates Confederation and sits above Millhaven Creek, near Odessa and next door to where Peter and his wife, Carol, still live. He’ll go on to explain that as the youngest of Henry and Irene’s six kids, he wanted no part of a career that demanded long, abnormal hours and adherence to duty. The story will continue with Peter leaving Toronto when he was 16 to live on the Davy farm with an elder sister. He would later enrol at Queen’s, meet Carol, marry Carol, and whisk her away to their matrimonial home — the Davy farm, which the groom had inherited. It wasn’t long, however, before the eager-yet-meagre farmer realized he was, as the saying goes, beating a dead horse.

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“We’re going broke” were the gloomy words he spoke to Carol one morning a couple of years into the ill-fated experiment. At the ensuing farm auction, everything was sold except the buildings and the land: equipment, tools, feed, livestock, the works. “It was strange waking up the next morning and seeing everything gone, even the four horses,” Peter remembers.

Needing a job, the young husband obtained his real estate licence through his brother’s Toronto office, and in March 1955 he opened Davy Real Estate, a one-man outfit operating out of a tiny “on loan” office at 83 Clarence St.

An astonishing 66 years later, he’s still at it, working out of rented office space on upper Princess Street and dealing primarily with longtime clients. His business — at its zenith it included 16 salespeople, a secretary and office manager Carol — is back to a one-man operation. Only the pandemic, not Davy’s zest for his job, has slowed his schedule.

At some juncture during the Faculty Club soiree, someone might ask Peter if he has roots in this area. Peter, eyes widening, will likely begin with a teaser — “Yes, but only as far back as the early 1800s” — then slide seamlessly into the saga of his great-great grandfather and namesake Peter Davy. He’ll tell how the latter and his four brothers travelled up from the United States in the late 18th century along with other United Empire Loyalists. The story goes that Peter’s “double-great” granddad, a barrel maker by trade, was paddling up Millhaven Creek looking for a suitable lot on which to build. He spotted a large stand of white oaks and immediately envisioned hundreds and hundreds of oak barrels. He paddled no further. The pioneering Davy applied for and was granted a “piece of clergy reserve” — roughly a 100-acre plot — and got busy building what future generations of Davys have come to call the “homestead.”

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No doubt a question will float from a wine glass as to how Peter and Carol met. The birthday boy, twisting his face into a warm smile, will exclaim, as he did to me: “Now that’s a REALLY interesting story!”

“I met her on a blind date,” the old-timer says, recalling university days when Davy also played alto sax in a pickup jazz and dance band. “A musician friend had made a date to bring this girl to a dance on campus, but he’d forgotten that his band was also playing the dance. He asked if I’d take her. I said sure; I’d seen her around campus and had already been trying to figure out how to hit on her. Instead, she fell right in my lap.”

The details of Date No. 1 remain a staple for a born raconteur like Davy, who celebrated 68 years of wedded bliss with Carol this past August. Throughout their lengthy union — the couple have two children, Carolynne and Chris, four grandkids and seven great-grandkids — Carol has also been an extra set of ears for her hearing-impaired husband. Peter started losing his hearing at age 15, a punishing fate for someone so musically inclined. Prior to having cochlear implants 15 years ago, his hearing was at 10 per cent. Of the cochlear procedure, he says appreciatively, “it changed my life.”

Ideally, before handshakes, hugs and farewell fist bumps signal the end of the impending festivities, someone in the know will ask the ageless agent for details of the night he spent in a jail cell. To hear Peter tell it, he was asking for it — the night in the clink, that is. Literally.

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It happened in 1951 in Lake Placid. Davy and two fellow summer student workers at Alcan, after finishing a Friday 4-to-12 shift, hit the highway in Davy’s ’51 Austin and arrived at the resort town in Upstate New York around 4 a.m. Unable to find lodging at that hour, they drove to a police station and asked the lone officer on duty if they could sleep in their car and leave it parked overnight on the lot. Fortunately for the visitors from Canada, business in the “crowbar hotel” was slow that night. So the cop went one better. He let the boys bed down in empty cells.

The next night in Syracuse, the trio, looking to save more Alcan dollars, figured they’d try again. Davy pulled the Austin into a police station lot late at night and asked the on-duty officer if he and his two pals could spend the night behind bars, so to speak.

The cop instead led Davy to the lockup area. “The cells were jammed full,” Davy recalls seven decades later. “The officer said, ‘Do you still want to stay here, buddy?’”

Patrick Kennedy is a retired Whig-Standard reporter. He can be reached at pjckennedy35@gmail.com.