Dan Davis–Miles Gentry relationship

Dan Davis and Miles Gentry’s relationship is the personal and business partnership at the center of Hired Girl’s rise—and of Dan’s eventual break with the company. Their contrasting strengths make them effective collaborators: Dan supplies the engineering and the desire for independence, while Miles brings legal and business experience and wants to build a large enterprise. When those ambitions diverge, a working partnership shaped by shared wartime history and mutual reliance becomes a contest over the future of the firm and Dan’s place in it.

Wartime Companions and Business Partners

Miles enters Dan’s account as a fellow veteran recalled to duty during the Six Weeks War. After Miles’s wife died around the time he was called back, he lived off post with a family in Albuquerque so his stepdaughter, Frederica, could have a home. Dan’s cat Pete stayed with Miles and the child; during the catastrophic weekend when Dan was in Dallas, Miles and Frederica were away on a seventy-two-hour pass and took Pete with them. This practical act of care links the men’s households as well as their military lives, and it helps explain why Pete survived the destruction that killed so many others.

When the war ended, Dan and Miles went into business together as insurance companies began selling cold sleep. They established their small factory in a surplus Air Force building in the Mojave Desert and made Hired Girl from Dan’s engineering work and Miles’s law and business experience. Their partnership was not a simple equality of contribution or authority. Dan says that more than 60 percent of the savings that started the enterprise were his and that the inventiveness and engineering were entirely his; he believed Miles could not have built Hired Girl, although he could have tried the venture with other partners. At the same time, Dan credits Miles as the businessman he himself was not, and acknowledges that he might otherwise have failed to turn his inventions into a profitable business.

The company’s early organization embodied that division of labor. Dan and Miles initially assembled the machines themselves; after the business grew, they brought in Belle Darkin to handle typing and bookkeeping. When they incorporated, Miles became president and general manager, Dan chief engineer and chairman of the board, and Belle secretary-treasurer. Dan retained 51 percent of the stock because control mattered to his independence, while allowing Miles substantial freedom over the business side. In retrospect, Dan calls that freedom excessive—not because Miles had no claim to his achievements, but because the arrangement left their different ideas of success to collide inside a company that Dan had founded to remain his own.

Divergent Ambitions

As Hired Girl’s sales grew, Dan found himself repeatedly pulled away from invention to deal with production problems. The prospect of more surplus buildings and a night shift threatened to consume the quiet creative time he needed. He therefore proposed that the company shrink its manufacturing operation: license Hired Girl and Window Willie to other firms, license Flexible Frank when it was ready, and collect royalties. Under his plan, the company would become Davis & Gentry Research Corporation, retaining only a few workers to help him develop new devices. The proposal was not a rejection of Miles’s contribution; it was Dan’s attempt to preserve the work he valued while giving Miles and Belle a business that could provide income without requiring Dan to manage a growing factory.

Miles rejected licensing as less profitable than producing and selling the products themselves. His disagreement disclosed an ambition that went beyond managing a small enterprise: he wanted the company to grow into a large business, and believed he had the talent to run one. He also disliked the prospect of spending his life in the Mojave as business manager to a solitary inventor. Dan, shocked by this declaration, initially offered to mortgage the company and buy Miles out if Miles wanted to leave. Miles said he did not want out; he wanted the business to expand. The dispute was thus not simply a disagreement over manufacturing methods. Dan sought autonomy and room to invent, whereas Miles saw scale and direct control of production as the route to the larger enterprise he wanted to lead.

The conflict took a decisive corporate form when Miles made a formal motion for the company to pursue his proposal. Dan expected Belle’s vote to defeat it and said he would not put forward his own counterproposal that night, preferring to talk and exchange views. Miles insisted on a roll-call vote. The resulting tally carried the proposal, though the supplied account does not detail the voting maneuver that produced it. The formal procedure matters because it converts a personal disagreement between partners into a decision binding on the corporation: the business’s future is settled by a vote rather than by the accommodation Dan had hoped to reach through discussion.

Expulsion and the Dispute over Trust

The breach became official in a letter dated November 18, 1970. The board voted to terminate all of Dan’s connection with the corporation apart from his status as a stockholder, invoked paragraph three of his contract, and instructed him to stay off company property. The letter thanked him for his services and described the separation as the result of differences in policy. Its restrained language contrasts with the deeper loss it records: Dan is removed from the enterprise whose inventions and early labor helped create it, while retaining shares but losing his working position and access to the shop.

Later, Dan returned to confront Miles and Belle and ask who had devised what he called the swindle. He accused them of falsifying a yellow-dog contract and patent assignments, arguing that the documents affected whether the products Mannix Enterprises wanted to buy—Hired Girl, Window Willie, and Flexible Frank—belonged to the company or had been taken from him. Dan said he had worked largely at night and had not been an employee, but had drawn living expenses against profits from his shares; Belle answered that he had worked for the company under contract. The encounter therefore reopens the partnership’s founding question of who contributed what, but now as a legal and ownership dispute rather than an acknowledged division of skills.

Dan’s accusation was specific: he described Belle bringing him papers to sign, with additional pages clipped beneath the first so that he saw the signature lines but not the concealed text. He believed she had inserted misleading documents into these stacks and had handled the mechanics of the alleged fraud. He then turned to Miles, reasoning that the carefully worded clause seven required legal expertise and asking whether Miles had drafted it. Miles did not admit to doing so; he warned Dan that he would not be trapped into an admission. The scene leaves the allegation contested, but it shows how completely the old working trust has collapsed: the papers once passed through a secretary’s hands for convenience have become, in Dan’s account, instruments by which the partners appropriated control.

The Partnership’s Changed Meaning

During the confrontation, Dan recalled that there had been a time when the response to his judgment was automatic, but insisted that he was not returning to the company. Miles called Dan’s language calculated to provoke them and urged Belle to keep quiet, presenting himself as a practical man who had tried to make Dan see reason and to arrange a settlement he would accept. Dan rejected that characterization as acquiescence to being cheated. Miles, speaking as a lawyer, argued that Dan could not win a suit and that staying out of court was preferable even to winning one; he nevertheless offered to hear what single action might placate Dan and allow them to reach terms.

Their relationship consequently carries more than a simple contrast between inventor and businessman. The wartime arrangement that placed Pete in Miles’s care and the postwar business that combined Dan’s engineering with Miles’s commercial abilities show sustained reliance and real cooperation. Yet the same partnership contains unequal forms of power: Dan supplies the work and inventions he regards as the firm’s foundation, while Miles’s managerial and legal authority shapes corporate decisions and, eventually, Dan’s removal. The later dispute does not erase their earlier collaboration; it makes its conditions visible. What began as a partnership intended to let each man use his strengths ends with Dan excluded from the shop and challenging the documents that define who owns what they built.