By Maggie Gill-Austern,Staff Writer

FARMINGTON – With a busy 8-5 schedule and meetings many nights of the week, its lucky Town Manager Richard Davis loves his job.

“It’s never boring,” Davis, 51, said in an interview Monday. “What I like about it is you’re doing something different all the time. You have to know a little bit about everything – from street drainage to personnel administration.”

He likes the fact that he arrives each morning, never knowing just what to expect, but knowing it will be interesting, whatever it is. “It’s a challenge, and it’s fun to meet those challenges,” he said.

An attraction to variety and a love of facing challenges shows up everywhere in Davis’ life.

He has a wide variety of interests, from Motown music, to vintage cars, to Civil War history, to taking hikes with wife, Shelly, with whom he “fell in love at first sight,” at their meeting more than 10 years ago.

Davis grew up in Pittsfield. His childhood, at least the way he describes it, was idyllic.

“It was a good life back then,” he said. He “practically grew up” on his grandfather’s farm, with his cousin, two brothers and one sister as playmates.

“We were always doing things like taking my little brother, tying him up in a grain bag, pulling him up in pulley, and dropping him down,” onto hay in the family barn, he said. On Saturday mornings, his grandmother made “us little doughnut men.”

“Boy, she was a fantastic cook,” he said. “Hers were probably as fresh as you could get.”

After high school, Davis spent his time doing odd jobs, mostly construction, until deciding he needed a change and joined the Air Force at the tail end of the Vietnam War. He spent his four years in the Air Force working with computers “at the time when computers took up a whole room,” he said.

“It’s kind of a laugh looking back on it,” he added.

While there, got interested in politics, and at the end of his term enrolled in public management classes at the University of Maine at Orono. He started working as a town manager in 1984, first in Buckfield, then in Wilton, and finally in Farmington.

Because of his busy schedule, Davis said, he has to work to find time to fit his interests in around his schedule. He and his wife take a walk together almost every day, he said, on their lunch hour. And when he can, he likes to hike, study history, learn about vintage cars, and travel. Someday, he said, he hopes to make it to Ireland to “see the castles” and to visit other historical sites around Europe.

Perhaps for the same reason he likes the challenge of his job, Davis enjoys reading about the obstacles people overcame in history. “It was a hard life,” he said, speaking of Civil War soldiers, “yet they struggled on and were really brave. There was a loyalty to the great cause you don’t see as much today.”