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Seymour Licht, a US Airways shareholder, memorably tangled with Mrs. Davis at a shareholder meeting a few years ago, when she was going on about how unjust it was for the company to schedule its meeting on the same day as another airline's. "I screamed at the top of my lungs, 'Shut this woman up,' and I couldn't get it to happen," said Licht, who himself is not exactly known for brevity at the annual meetings. "I don't enjoy meeting her under those conditions, to be very blunt and straightforward." Later in that meeting, Mrs. Davis asked CEO Doug Parker if he was afraid of her. "Just a little bit," he replied, according to published reports at the time. A US Airways representative declined comment. "We wish Evelyn well," spokesman John McDonald said. Mrs. Davis was born to a wealthy family in Amsterdam in 1929, two months before the stock market crash pitched the U.S. into the Great Depression. She survived a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, a detail confirmed by the International Tracing Service, a respected archive of Holocaust-era documents. Mrs. Davis moved to the Baltimore area after World War II with her father and began investing in the 1950s. She is short and speaks loudly -- or just shouts -- in a heavy Dutch accent. Her hair and makeup are always in place, her suits impeccable. In a biography filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission when she was a panelist for a roundtable there on shareholder issues, she described herself as "a four times Divorcee with NO children." If executives are exasperated by her theatrics, they have yet to put a muzzle on her. Her access to them is uncanny. She calls them directly and often, and she can be fierce when she doesn't get what she wants. Terry Lundgren, the CEO of Macy's, said that Mrs. Davis always has "something interesting to say." "The meetings tend to go longer when she's there," Lundgren said. "But she's actually had some subjects that have been of interest to our shareholders and that we've responded to."
In 2005, Macy's decided to make its board members stand for re-election every year instead of every three years. The company noted at the time that Mrs. Davis had been submitting a proposal asking for just that since 1988, and had won majority support from other shareholders in the most recent years. Goldman Sachs was a prominent topic in last year's "Highlights and Lowlights," where Mrs. Davis blasted the bank for racking up legal and regulatory fines. Of Blankfein, she reported: "Near the end of the 2011 GS meeting we told Lloyd,
'You are NOT a bad looking guy.' All of a sudden, he became VERY nice!!!!" Steve Sadove, the CEO of Saks, is a "Highlights and Lowlights" reader. "She has good insights," he said. "You get a sense of various meetings, how they went." Sadove didn't get much play in last year's edition. Mrs. Davis put Saks on the list of annual meetings that she found satisfactory. The cover featured a picture of Mrs. Davis with auto executive Bill Ford, and a caption identifying him as "His Majesty King William Ford the Great." A Ford spokesman, Jay Cooney, declined comment. "We appreciate her longstanding interest as a shareholder of the Ford Motor Company," he said. Mrs. Davis is open to publishing "Highlights and Lowlights" again next year
-- "A grand finale, or whatever you call it." She hopes to return to the meeting circuit next year as well. That is, if the earth doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012, as the Mayan calendar is said to have predicted. She's inclined to think it might happen. "Oh well," said Mrs. Davis. "There's no use to worrying about things you can't change."
[Associated
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