Hubert Boyd paid $16,500 for the house. Inside, Elsie had an eye for the fine details. She installed dark hardwood floors
in the dining room—not just any hardwood, but narrow tight-fitting boards of dark oak, the best that money could buy. She
bought a fine mahogany dining-room table and placed a runner of Irish linen atop it. For the living room, where her growing
family would spend long winter evenings, she bought a cast iron gas heater, and to brighten those winter
evenings she covered the walls with pink paper. The living room’s other feature was a black Steinway, a gift from Hubert.
Elsie liked to play it, having taught piano before she was married.
For Erie in the late 1920s it was a comfortable middle-class home. Hubert Boyd was a traveling salesman for HammerMill Paper
Company, and a job at the “HammerMill” was both prestigious and well-paying.
Elsie Boyd was the daughter of Julia and Rudolph Beyer. Her father farmed a small piece of land just south of Erie. Elsie
was a German Presbyterian, an ample woman with enormous pride and the self-confidence to freely express her beliefs, many
of which were synthesized in pithy expressions such as “The world is not the way you want it to be. The world is the way it
is.” Or “You have to speak up in this world.” Or “Never give up and never give in.” Her voice was deep and authoritative,
and when she spoke there rarely was any doubt about her meaning.
For his part, Hubert Boyd was the son of Mary Golden and Thomas Boyd. Thomas worked on a boat, probably a fishing boat, that
plied the Great Lakes, and his son was a tall, thin, happy-go-lucky fellow with brown eyes and a shock of wavy black hair.
Although he was Catholic and had baptized his children as Catholics, he preferred the golf course to church.
It was into this contented and fortunate family that John Richard Boyd was born on January 23, 1927.
When Boyd was born, his mother and father shared the front bedroom. His sister Marion, age eleven, had her own room. The third
bedroom was shared by the boys. Bill, who had just turned ten, and Hubert—called Gerry—who was four. John’s crib stayed in
the bedroom with his parents. On September 23, 1928, Ann was born—the fifth and last child in the Boyd family.
After Ann’s birth, the prospect of feeding and clothing five children began to loom large in the mind of Hubert Boyd. He had
never gone to college. His quick smile and Irish ebullience had given him a good job at the HammerMill, but he knew that his
natural gifts could take him only so far. He wanted his children to have advantages he never had. He preached to Marion the
need for a college education. During the fall of 1926 he talked to a neighbor about buying an insurance
policy that would pay for his children’s education should anything happen to him. But he was young and decided to wait.
In late November of 1929, Hubert spent several weeks “down South” on a sales trip. No one remembers exactly where, only, as
Marion says, that it was “somewhere down there where it was warm.” He came home to record cold and record snowfall, celebrated
Christmas with his family, and in mid-January contracted lobar pneumonia. The family attributed the pneumonia to the drastic
difference in temperature between the South and Erie, with the clear implication that the South was to blame. Doctors, however,
generally attribute lobar pneumonia either to chronic smoking or to a systemic infection, and Hubert was a heavy smoker.
During Hubert’s illness all the children save Ann were farmed out to their father’s sisters in south Erie; Mrs. Boyd would
take care of her husband and she would do it on her own. The children rarely visited. Marion came home once and found her
father had been moved from his cold bedroom into her room. The windows were open to allow the wind off the lake to blow through—the
idea, current in the medical community of the time, was to “freeze out” the pneumonia. Marion sat in a chair at the top of
the steps, shivered with the cold, and cried.
Icy temperatures and bitter winds were insufficient to cure the pneumonia and Hubert Boyd died January 19, 1930. He was thirty-seven,
and was buried on John’s third birthday.
When Marion was in her mideighties, she said her father’s death was not as painful as it might appear. In most families the
father is home every night. But her father was “gone all the time.” She said that for months after the funeral she thought,
“Oh, Dad’s on a trip.” But she was a teenager when her father died and her recollection was softened by the passage of seventy
years. John was too young to understand the concept of travel and returning home. Even if he could, there had to have been
a moment when the painful realization sank in that he would grow up without a father, that he was therefore different from
other children.
Hubert Boyd had only $10,000 in life insurance and most of that was used to pay off the mortgage. Elsie faced the insurmountable
task of supporting and rearing five children. Ann and John were little more than infants, so whatever work she found would
have to enable
her to stay at home. But the Great Depression was spreading across America and even a bustling port city such as Erie was
beginning to feel the effects.
She had still another burden, a self-imposed burden. As the wife of a salesman for the HammerMill, Elsie had enjoyed a certain
lifestyle and a certain community standing. She wanted to maintain both. This meant people in Erie must think she did not
really need to work.
She began baking cakes and selling them to neighbors. None of the children remembers the price, but in the early 30s she could
have made only a few cents on each cake. She made various sorts but became famous around Erie for her devil’s food cake and,
at Christmas, her date-and-nut cake. One Christmas she had orders for eighty cakes, and for several weeks the house turned
into a bakery. For so many cakes to come from such a small oven in such a short period of time necessitated split-second timing
from dawn to dusk. Elsie Boyd did not allow the children to help. They were ordered to stay out of the kitchen.
Mrs. Boyd also began selling Christmas cards and stationery, and found a third job conducting telephone solicitations for
advertisements that went inside program booklets for banquets. She did this from the house on Lincoln Street and tended to
the children between calls.
Marion remembers that when her mother solicited ads from the home telephone, her voice was deep and commanding, “strong, persuasive,
and in control.” Mrs. Boyd wanted people in Erie to know that even though her husband was dead, nothing had changed. The Boyd
family of Lincoln Avenue was doing quite well, thank you.
But events were gathering, momentous events, beyond even the ability of the redoubtable Elsie Boyd to control.
Elsie settled into a curious dichotomy in raising her children. On the one hand she allowed them almost free reign, especially
around the house. The postman once reported to Mrs. Boyd that John was running naked through the backyard and playing in the
sprinkler. At the dinner table, tempers often exploded and the children shouted at each other. Much about the household was
loud and raucous, freewheeling and unrestrained.
If Mrs. Boyd granted her children unusual freedoms within her house, she was more than diligent in imparting rules for outside
the
house. She inculcated her children with a protective mechanism they remembered all their lives. Over and over again she said
if people knew too much about the Boyd family they would use the knowledge in a critical manner.
Never tell people what you don’t want repeated,
she preached.
People will seek out your weaknesses and faults, so tell them only of your strong points. No family matters must ever be mentioned
beyond the front door.
This resulted in the Boyd children being extraordinarily reticent about all but the most inconsequential of family matters,
even when they reached old age.
While Elsie had striven mightily to have people in Erie think she was as comfortable as before her husband died, inside the
home she turned poverty into a cardinal virtue. She taught all her children, but especially John since he was at his most
malleable age, that they had principles and integrity often lacking in those with money and social position. She hammered
into John that as long as he held on to his sense of what was right, and as long as his integrity was inviolate, he was superior
to those who had only rank or money. She also taught him that a man of principle frightened other people and that he would
be attacked for his beliefs, but he must always keep the faith. “If you’re right, you’re right,” she said.
For several years after her husband died, Elsie maintained a semblance of religion in her household. Because her husband had
been a Catholic and because all the children were baptized in the Catholic church, she encouraged Marion and Gerry to attend
church. But she was becoming increasingly annoyed by what she saw as church pressure for greater financial contributions.
Then came the day when Marion, who was studying for her Confirmation, could not remember her catechism. Marion reported to
her mother that the priest ridiculed her in front of the class and made her kneel before him “like he was a tin god.” Such
authoritarian behavior on the part of priests then was the rule rather than the exception, but Elsie Boyd—a Presbyterian and
a mother burdened with protecting her children against the world—was furious at the way the priest had humiliated Marion and,
by extension, her family. She called the priest and said, “I have enough trouble trying to keep this family together without
having a priest pick on my children.” When the priest protested, Mrs. Boyd laced into him with even more animus. The priest
insisted he was right, at which point Mrs. Boyd
ended the conversation by serving notice she was removing her children from the Catholic church.
John was too young to be troubled by this. But Marion had heard what happened to children who left the church and she thought,
“Oh, my. I’m going to hell.” Two of Hubert Boyd’s sisters, both of whom were devout Catholics, were more than a little disturbed
by this theological shift and feared for the souls of the children. Bitter recriminations ensued.
Elsie, as usual, was unbending. These were her children and she would raise them as she saw best. Her dead husband’s sisters
had no voice in the matter. She summarily tossed them from her house; it would be years before any of the Boyd children were
allowed to visit the two aunts.
This was not the last time Elsie was to demonstrate her willingness to sever a relationship with any person or any institution
that offended her. She could do it without a second thought, without looking back, without any willingness to discuss the
issue. Once she shut the door it was closed forever. John warned by her example, and it was a lesson he would remember.
A few weeks later Elsie withdrew her children from the Catholic Church and decided that John would be raised as a Presbyterian.
So one Sunday Marion drove John to the Church of the Covenant in downtown Erie and enrolled him in Sunday School. But it was
not long before Elsie decided the Presbyterians were little better than the Catholics. “All they want is money,” she complained.
She had no money for the church. She severed her relationship with the Presbyterians and withdrew John from Sunday School.
For years she inveighed against organized religion. John grew up not attending church and without any religious affiliation.
On Air Force records he would later list his religion as Presbyterian, but that was only a word to fill in a blank space.
For several years it seemed that despite all odds Elsie might prevail in her battle to control her world. It seemed she had
surmounted the difficulties life had placed in her path. Life settled into a tolerable routine.
Marion graduated from high school and was attending Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, when, on March 20, 1933, she received
a
letter from her mother. The letter said the Depression had forced banks in Erie to close and that John had the measles and
had to stay home from school for sixteen days. “It was terrible trying to keep him in a dark room,” Elsie wrote. “He is acting
like a young colt.” She said the front of the house was posted with a large sign saying a case of measles was inside and predicted
that Ann would soon have them too.
Ann did contract measles, and a month or so after the disease had run its course, she became sick again, this time with a
kidney infection. She stayed for two weeks at a nearby Catholic hospital, and when she came home, she was weak and listless.
Eventually Dr. Frank Krimmel, the family doctor, came to the house, examined Ann, and pronounced that she had polio. In 1933
very little was known about polio. It was thought to be a contagious summer disease, perhaps contracted in swimming pools.
As was the practice at the time, a large sign was tacked to the front door of the Boyd home saying
POLIO MYELITIS
. No one could enter except family members. When neighborhood children passed the house, they walked on the other side of
Lincoln Street and shouted to any Boyd children who might be visible, “We don’t want to catch anything!” They treated the
house as if it had been visited by the plague.
In later years John would have special reason to remember this.
After Ann was diagnosed with polio, her mother stripped the linen runner from the fine mahogany dining table and the table
became a place to perform stretching exercises for Ann’s twisted legs. Every day Ann was gently placed on the table and Elsie
rubbed and pulled and massaged her tiny legs. Her disease dominated the Boyd household. Elsie wanted to take Ann to the nearby
Zem Zem Shriners Hospital where treatment was both good and free, but the hospital rarely admitted Catholic children. She
went to a neighbor who was a Mason and asked him to plead Ann’s case. He did and Ann was admitted, but the treatment was to
little avail. A few months later the doctors said Ann should have surgery on her foot. She transferred to a clinic in Cleveland,
where she stayed a year. Even in the early 1930s such a lengthy stay, combined with complex treatment, was expensive. The
surgery and the hospital bill was paid by HammerMill Paper Company. A second operation was performed on a charity
basis. Elsie ordered her children never to tell anyone how payment for the operations was handled.