James Arthur Davis

Although her parents were from Arkansas, Norris Church Mailer (born as Barbara Jean Davis) was born on Jan. 31, 1949, in the state of Washington, where her father, James Davis, took a job building a dam while putting his family up in a trailer. By the time she was 2 they had returned to Arkansas, and she grew up in Atkins in a home that had an outhouse.

Norris wrote in her 2010 memori, "A Ticket to the Circus:"

After the war, my father, James Davis, who had learned how to operate heavy earthmoving equipment in the Seabees on Okinawa, came back to Atkins, Arkansas, and worked in his cousin Check's grocery store (called Davis Groceries). One Saturday night my father and his buddy Reece drove fifteen miles to Dardanelle to hang out and look for girls. James was cute-twenty-two, tall and lanky, with curly blond hair and blue eyes, and a big shiny smile that featured a gold cap on the bottom half of his front tooth, acquired at fourteen when he stuck a broom handle into a buzz saw and a piece of it flew back and hit him in the mouth.
James pursued her (Gaynell Phillips) hot and heavy for a few weeks. Then one day he pulled into the yard, scattering chickens, and announced he was going out to Washington state to work on the O'Sullivan Dam and if she wanted to go with him, they could get married. By then she knew he was not the owner of Davis Groceries, as he had kind of let her assume in the beginning, but she liked him anyway. He was sweet. So, two months after they met, on January 18, 1947, they got married, packed up the old car, and headed to the Northwest to Moses Lake, Washington. They lived in a tiny homemade trailer with a bed resting on orange crates, and no fridge, but what the heck? They were newlyweds.

Sources

1. November 21, 2010 Norris Church Mailer, Artist and Ally, Dies at 61 By JOSEPH BERGER