Colleagues, friends remember legislator

HAYES, Va. -- Mourners remembered Rep. Jo Ann Davis on Thursday as someone who grew up poor and worked her way from secretarial jobs to a seat in Congress, but who never forgot the circumstances or the people she came from.

About 1,000 people filled a sanctuary of the Republican's home church, including Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, several dozen members of Congress and state lawmakers, to remember Davis, 57, who died Saturday, two years after she was found to have breast cancer.

"We really have lost a great American today," said U.S. Rep. Sue Wilkins Myrick, a N.C. Republican, Davis' closest friend on Capitol Hill. "That was the great thing about her. How could you not love her? What you saw is what you got."

In 2000, Davis became Virginia's first Republican woman elected to Congress. She was a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee. She was buried with full military honors.

In the hourlong service, Davis was remembered as unashamed of her Christian beliefs, someone who would espouse them on Capitol Hill and who was known to kneel in her congressional office in prayer.

"Jo Ann Davis always had her priorities right, and God's going to be very good to Jo Ann," Myrick said.

Bobby Collins, a pastor to Davis in Virginia, said she was never quite at home amid the formal trappings of money and power. She was more comfortable sitting on the back porch of her country home than in her seat in the Capitol, Collins said.

Collins recalled Davis' surprise soon after she took her seat in Washington when she called her sister-in-law and told her with amazement and alarm in her voice: "Some of these people lie," Collins said as the crowd broke into laughter.

In the sanctuary of the Lighthouse Worship Center, Davis' flag-draped coffin sat between two modest sprays of flowers and framed portraits with her family. Family album photographs of Davis flashed on a large screen overhead, and a five-piece Navy brass ensemble played mournful patriotic and religious tunes, including the "Navy Hymn."

Outside the church, Donna Godfrey of Yorktown said she knew Davis before her years in politics through a Bible study class she attended at Davis' home.

"I always thought she would forget about all of us, but she didn't. She would call us when she was back home and we'd go have lunch. She was just an ordinary person who made it in politics," Godfrey said.

After graduating from public schools, Davis attended Hampton Roads Business College; she got her real estate license in 1984 and her real estate broker's license four years later. In 1990, she opened Jo Ann Davis Realty.

Before Congress, she served four years in the Virginia House of Delegates.

In 2005, she was found to have breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy. The disease went into remission but returned this year. As she endured a new round of chemotherapy, she often monitored hearings in Washington from home.

She was undergoing treatment at Duke University, where doctors' reports had been encouraging until her health took a sharp and sudden downturn two weeks ago.

Survivors include her husband, Chuck, two sons and a granddaughter.