Chapter 2 of The Finders - N

Short Biographies of other Counterculture Influencers The Finders Associated With: Sol Gareth “Garry” Davis

Was there anyone that Finders leader Marion Pettie both criticized and admired as much as Sol Gareth “Garry” Davis? Possibly, but we know that Pettie both respected and despised Davis. Davis was born in Bar Harbor, Maine, on July 27, 1921. Davis’s parents were Meyer Davis (a world-famous Jewish band leader) and Hilda Emery (an Irish musician, pianist, and composer). Meyer Davis was a band leader for bands that played for the elite of the elite! “Meyer Davis himself provided his distinctive society beat for the weddings and debuts of the Astors, du Ponts, Rockefellers, Fords, Dukes, Drexels, and Firestones. He also led the band at seven Inaugural Balls for Presidents from Calvin Coolidge to John F. Kennedy.” Garry Davis attended Carnegie Mellon University, studying drama, and acting in 1940. Davis would later act on Broadway in Let’s Face It when he was nineteen years old. Davis lost interest in becoming an actor after his older brother Bud Davis was killed in action while on a United States Navy destroyer off the coast of Italy during World War II. Garry Davis would later join the United States Army Air Corps and became a B-17 bomber pilot “to exact revenge” for his brother’s death by the Axis powers. Davis would later regret joining the United States Army Air Corps and started feeling remorse over his bombing runs over Germany. “Ever since my first mission over Brandenburg, I had felt pangs of conscience,” Davis wrote in his autobiography My County is the World: The Adventures of a World Citizen. “How many men, women and children had I murdered?”[1] [2] [3]