![]() My mother wasn't crazy about it, saying she felt like she was riding around in a fish bowl, but we kids loved the car and the crowds it would inevitably attract. ![]() A month later the "Lambo" rolled off a ship in Boston and quickly became the toast of the greater North Reading area. They visited the Lamborghini factory and he fell in love with an eye-popping model with blue metallic paint and a glass roof. He brought a Lamborghini home from Italy-and inspired Jay Leno: Stan and Jeanne were touring Italy around 1970 with a group of Wynns' salesmen. (I plead the Fifth on whether I, as the inheritor of what is known as "the butter gene," have ever done anything similar). Stan loved butter: According to my mother, after a night of hijinks the two of them often ended up an all-night diner, where, after consuming a plate of bacon and eggs, Stan would take his knife and shave off pieces of butter and.eat them. My mother always thought it was unfair that Stan looked dashing and Errol Flynn-like in his pictures, while she was shown with bedraggled hair and her feet in a tub of hot water. The crash made the front page of all the local newspapers. When he realized she hadn't escaped, Stan dove back into the plane, wrenched her door open and dragged her to safety. My mother Jeanne was with him, and she went into shock from the crash, unable to undo her seat belt and escape the sinking plane. The one that seemed amazing to me as a child occurred during the late 1950s, when he lost an engine just short of the runway at Logan and put the plane down in Boston Harbor. He survived a lot of plane crashes: By our count he walked away from at least five plane crashes. I thought I would share a few Stan stories and memories for Father's Day-some of them will be familiar to his friends, and some are just, well, Stan being Stan. Stan was an inveterate storyteller, and like most people with big personalities, a lot of stories revolved around himself. I'm sure I've left several careers out, but that's a start. Over his lifetime, his pursuits included: commercial pilot, aerial advertiser, golf course owner, salesman, KFC owner (6 stores), Wynn's auto products distributor (40 salesmen), apartment, condo and home builder, hotel and outlet mall owner, classic car dealer, and inventor (corn-shaped popcorn bowl). He left Penn State before graduating to join the Navy, and went on to fly seaplanes in the Pacific during World War II. He was a completely self-made man, raised modestly in Reading, Mass. People who knew him talk to me about him all the time, always with a smile on their face. So many people loved Stan during his lifetime, and a number of them considered him their mentor. I'm certain that because of him, there is at least one KFC store up there now, as well as an outlet mall, a couple of apartment complexes and maybe a new subdivision or two. My father, Stan Davis, passed away about a year and a half ago, and I'm sure that heaven still hasn't recovered from his arrival.
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