CHAPEL HILL - Walter Royal Davis, a Pasquotank County farmer's son who became a Texas oil tycoon before returning to North Carolina as a force in politics and higher education, died Monday night at his Chapel Hill home.

With a 300-pound body and a booming boardroom voice, Davis, 88, was legendary for making things happen. He gave millions of dollars to UNC-Chapel Hill and was a trustee for 16 years.

Davis entertained on a grand scale, and he was known to leave five-thousand-dollar tips for struggling clerks and waitresses. Through scholarship programs and in personal gifts to young people he met, Davis put more than 1,300 students through colleges and nursing schools in North Carolina and Texas.

UNC-CH named its central library for Davis in the 1980s. He had persuaded legislators to provide money for it.

A Manteo elementary school named a hallway for him in the 1990s. He had provided a monthly ice cream endowment for fifth-graders.

"Walter was, I believe, the most generous man I've ever met," said actor Andy Griffith of Manteo, a longtime friend. "He gave to people that nobody even knows about."

From potatoes to oil

Davis never attended college. He was born Jan. 11, 1920, and grew up on a potato farm near Elizabeth City. After graduating from Hargrave Military Academy, he found work as a store clerk and a truck driver.

He drove textiles from southern factories to northern finishing plants, then moved into management with a California trucking firm.

Davis moved to Midland, Texas, in 1952. He started his petroleum empire with borrowed money to buy five tanker trucks that plowed through muddy fields to reach wells that produced oil for remote pipelines. After selling his Permian Corp. to Occidental Petroleum in 1966, he chafed in his new role as No. 2 man under CEO Armand Hammer.

Davis broke with Hammer and started a second oil transport company, bought refineries, and invested in oil and gas drilling ventures and other businesses. Back in his home state, he invested in real-estate projects, including Kildaire Farms in Cary, and Bald Head Island and Southern Shores on the coast.

Hammer wasn't the first authority figure Davis clashed with, or the last.

As a boy, he butted heads with his father over pre-dawn chores that included milking the cow and feeding chickens, hogs and 22 mules. He walked three miles to school and was kicked out the first day, he recalled in 1982, for slugging the principal.

Later, North Carolina trucking executive Malcolm McLean fired Davis for giving his first wife a ride in a company truck. They had driven to Washington to see Franklin Roosevelt's third inauguration.

Living big

Davis was a big contributor to politicians in both major parties, sometimes giving to opponents in the same contest.

He took Lyndon Johnson fishing on his boat. He counted liberal Democrats William Fulbright and Hubert Humphrey as friends, and he supported conservative Republicans Richard Nixon and Jesse Helms. After he returned to North Carolina in the 1970s, Davis also backed Tar Heel Democrats Jim Hunt and Terry Sanford.

In the 1980s, he became mentor to Marc Basnight, a young Manteo builder running for a state Senate seat.

Basnight would become Senate leader and the most powerful figure in North Carolina politics. But he was intimidated the first time Davis picked him up in a big car, puffing a cigar.

Davis peppered him with questions on wide-ranging subjects and pronounced him "one of the dumbest people he ever met," Basnight recalled. But Davis gave Basnight a subscription to The Economist magazine and began his tutoring.

"It made me understand there was a wider world than the Outer Banks and even North Carolina," Basnight said.

Davis enjoyed the good life and big gestures. He took UNC board members to parties at his beach house. He rented trains in Europe to take friends on vacation. His attorney, Cecil Munn of Fort Worth, Texas, recalled an outing with Davis that began as a fishing trip for five couples -- to New Zealand, Tahiti and Hong Kong.

"On the plane to Tokyo he said, 'Let's take another month and go around the world,' " Munn said. The trip ended with a flight home from London on the Concorde.

Davis went to Las Vegas to gamble and to Hong Kong to buy clothes for his huge frame.

"I just cannot find tailors here who can fit this body," he said in 2001.

Outspoken at UNC

His gifts to UNC-CH included $1 million to help build the sports arena named for basketball coach Dean Smith. He gave $1.4 million for students who would teach in poor areas of northeastern North Carolina.

Davis held courtside tickets to all UNC home basketball games, and he frequently distributed them to medical students and friends.

Every spring for more than 20 years, he distributed ACC and NCAA basketball tournament tickets and political advice from his office suite in the Governors Inn at Research Triangle Park.

Davis served as a Duke University trustee and a member of the statewide UNC Board of Governors, and he endowed buildings and programs at N.C. State and Elizabeth City State universities.

Davis quit the UNC board in 1991 after charging that C.D. Spangler Jr., then the UNC president, was advancing his family fortune while neglecting the university's problems. Later, Davis was a critic of Spangler's successor, Molly Broad, and a key figure in contentious efforts to win greater autonomy for UNC-Chapel Hill.

"He was not bashful about letting his feelings be known," former UNC-CH chancellor Paul Hardin said.

'A tough guy'

In recent years Davis was weakened after a series of strokes, but he continued to receive visitors at his Chapel Hill home. A few hundred friends came from a half-dozen states for his 88th birthday party in January.

"He was a tough guy, by God, and he fought to his last breath," said Bob Eubanks of Chapel Hill, his son-in-law and former business partner. "He was always looking for ways to help people. He used to tell me he wanted to give away the last dollar he had on the day he died."