A Toast to the Master of Tall Tales

Dave Davis, a teller of tall tales, could spin a yarn from his own life stories. “But nobody’d believe it,” said Davis, 60, bellowing with laughter.

Davis’ stories have won him several local speech contests and a place on the team that competed in the recent Toastmasters division finals. Davis, a Pico Rivera plumbing contractor, is one of Southeast Los Angeles’ best orators, said Santa Fe Toastmasters member Dorothy Lewis. “He is a formidable force to reckon with in speech contests,” she said.

He shares his tall tales with fellow members of Toastmasters, a social club dedicated to helping people develop verbal skills. Davis’ most recent winning story, a spy thriller based loosely on the movie “Casablanca,” involves himself, a beautiful colleague named Purity Chaste (“Chaste Makes Waste” is her motto) and a waterfront dive where they meet each other and a “cesspool of humanity.”

Another of his winning tales involves lusty laundry that “ends up stretched out side by side on the bed, all washed up,” he said. The stories usually take about three minutes to tell and always have a surprise ending.

Four years ago, out of a need for “good conversation and civilized discussion without argument,” he joined the local Toastmasters.

“Telling stories was nothing I gave much thought to before that,” he said. “I was simply interested in ideas and new ways of looking at things.” He and his companion Jean (“We’ve had 22 years of holy acrimony,” Davis said) for years have hosted gatherings where people could share ideas.

Born and raised in Pico Rivera, Davis is the son of transplanted Midwesterners. His father was also a plumber and his mother worked for the gas company.

“They were traditional and conservative,” he said. “I guess you could say they lived the unexamined life.

“I was so unsophisticated that when my mother said I should become an engineer, I thought she meant the guy who drives a locomotive,” he said. “Back then they were all steam and made an awful lot of noise, and it wasn’t anything I was at all interested in.”

What he was interested in was the how and why of life, he said.

That interest prompted him at age 42 to leave a lucrative job at a plumbing company to become a piano player. Later he started his own plumbing business because it paid better than playing, but he still teaches piano, plays with professional groups and manages the Whittier Musicians Workshop.

Sometimes Davis accompanies his stories on the piano. But he has no plans to leave plumbing again to try to make a living telling tales.

“I never try to plot a course too far into the future,” Davis said. He plans to continue creating stories, even though he is unsure where they come from. “They come in a glimmer of an idea,” he said. “You embellish it, puff it up a little. And it becomes a story.”

Louis Murdock, vice president of student affairs at Cal State Dominguez Hills, has been selected to become a member of 100 Black Men of Los Angeles, a nonprofit group of local leaders and officials who want to improve the quality of life for blacks and other minorities.

Murdock, 52, of Carson was one of four men selected to join. He holds a doctorate in counseling from the University of Pittsburgh.

Jimmy Smith, a junior at Long Beach Polytechnic High School, and Myiesha Taylor, a recent graduate of Millikan High School, each won $500 from the United Negro College Fund to defray the costs of visiting a United Negro College Fund member college or university.

Warren High School in the Downey Unified School District had six National Merit Scholar finalists in its 1992 graduating class. Out of 1 million U.S. seniors, only 6,300 are chosen as finalists, according to the organization.

Each finalist receives as much as $2,000 in scholarship. This year’s Warner High winners are Jeff Chen, Paul Chun, Ryan Higman, Chang Kim, Young Kook and David Tien.