The original plan to have 20,000 volumes of the best books available to readers of the city and county has been completed. Mr. Davis has put more than a quarter-million dollars of his own money into the development of the Bobby Davis Memorial Park , with a swimming pool and picnic grounds that is in use everyday of the summer season. Into these walls on bronze plates are 188 names of sons of Perry County who gave their lives in World War II, including the son of Mr. Davis. Mr. Davis built a home for himself and Mrs. Davis on a spot overlooking the swimming pool, where he lives during his summer stay in Hazard. Other Projects Sponsored After completion of the park, Mr. Davis started planning for a long-range program that would make Hazard the trading center of eastern Kentucky where a quarter million people in a 15 county area surrounded the city.
Hazard is the largest city in the area.
Future tourist attractions are in the program that Mr. Davis worked up. He made a survey and started advertising that 40 million people live within a 8 hour drive of Hazard, and his Miami experience convinced him that tourist trade is the outstanding asset of a city located in the midst of natural beauty such as surrounds Hazard. Mr. Davis returned form Miami about 1949 to find city officials of Hazard and Jaycees bogged down in a program that would put the city under a bonded debt of something like a million dollars to build a field house. Investigating the project fully, Mr. Davis set out to find ways and means of building a gymnasium without the bonded debt. Locating a site almost under the doorsteps of the high school's back door that had entirely overlooked by everyone else, Mr. Davis went to work to secure the land and lay plans for a gymnasium.