Archives West Finding Aid

Charles E. Davis, Jr. was born in La Verne, California, in 1923, the son of a minister and Christian Educator in the Church of the Brethren. During World War II, he registered as a conscientious objector and entered Civilian Public Service. He was at Camp #56 from June, 1943 to December, 1944 — a period that saw the genesis of and much activity in the Fine Arts Group. With his background in printing, "Chuck" Davis was a key figure in teaching the Fine Arts members how to set type and operate a press. He supplied their first printing press, a tabletop Kelsey model, which was used to print some of the early books, beginning with Glen Coffield's The Horned Moon.

Davis served in other CPS camps, including Camp #115 in Pinehurst, North Carolina, where he was a "guinea pig" for experiments in atypical pneumonia; and spent the 1945 calendar year at Camp #27 in Tallahassee, Florida working on public sanitation projects. From January 1946 until his discharge in June of that year, he was at Camp #34, Unit 4, at New Windsor, Maryland, where he set up and ran an in-house printing shop for the Church World Service Relief Center, the hub for relief shipments being sent to Europe. It was also the center for the new Heifer Project (founded by Dan West, a Brethren farmer from Indiana), which has grown into the iconic Heifer International.

After the war, Davis returned to La Verne, married Mildred Streit and raised a family. In 1946, while a student at La Verne College, he printed Glen Coffield's The Horse of Summer, under the imprint of C D Print, done on the 9x15 Chandler and Price press on which he had spent so many hours printing for college activities before being drafted. He earned a B.A. and M.A., worked as a printer from 1948-1957, then taught Printing Management at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, retiring in 1984. While there he became known as "Charlie," and continued to use that name when he owned and operated Windsor Graphics, a trade typesetting and graphic arts camera shop for nine years.

His major avocation has been clock collecting and repair, where he was also known as "Charlie" during twenty-seven years of teaching. His website, JapaneseClockLogos.com, highlights his interest in how the Japanese adoption of the Yankee eight-day time and strike clock style and production methods provided their introduction to semi-precision manufacturing.

[Source: Zachariah Selley, Lewis and Clark College, 2015]