Annette Davies

Annette Davies

Annette was a longtime member of both the Capital City Cocker Club and the Maryland Cocker Spaniel Club. She was involved in an automobile collision on December 30th, 2003 and succumbed to her injuries on New Year's Eve.

From the January 2nd, 2004 edition of the Baltimore Sun. A synopsis was read during services.

Annette Feinberg Davies, a world-renowned dog-show judge who with her late husband ran a beer distributorship based in Elkridge, died Wednesday at Maryland Shock Trauma Center after suffering injuries in a car accident Tuesday on Reisterstown Road. She was 78.

She was born Annette Levin and was raised in Queens, N.Y., where she attended high school.

She overcame polio as a child after doctors told her she would never walk again. She relentlessly dragged herself out of bed until she started to crawl and eventually moved one leg and learned to walk, said her daughter, Enid Feinberg of Phoenix.

"That really defined the courage and drive she had her whole life," Ms. Feinberg said. "I don't think there was anything she didn't accomplish if she set her mind to it."

After high school, Mrs. Davies earned a degree in biochemistry from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., in the early 1940s, Ms. Feinberg said. Mrs. Davies and her first husband, Maurice Feinberg, moved to the Baltimore area shortly afterward and lived in Phoenix.

She was in charge of laboratories at Church Home and Hospital in Baltimore and began to raise cocker spaniels and other show dogs in 1957.

She divorced her first husband in 1970 and married Alfred E. Davies in 1976.

Mr. Davies had started his beer distributing company, A.E. Davies Distributing Co., in 1969. He and Mrs. Davies ran the company while also owning and exhibiting best-in-show dogs.

In 1990, they started Pride of Maryland Beer. After her husband's death in 1994, Mrs. Davies ran both companies before selling them.

Mrs. Davies was active in the Maryland Cocker Spaniel Club and was an American Kennel Club delegate. She judged dogs in Russia, Switzerland and France and was a judge at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York.

Services will be at 2 p.m. today at Sol Levinson & Bros., 8900 Reisterstown Road.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a son, Howard Feinberg of Chappaqua, N.Y.