Posted on 01/28/2007 12:24:57 AM PST by csvset
L.M. Boyd, the master gatherer of random facts whose Grab Bag column entertained generations of Sunday Chronicle readers, died on Monday at his Seattle home. He was 79.
Louis Malcolm Boyd was known as "Mal" to his friends in Seattle, where he wrote a daily column that was syndicated in 400 papers until he retired in December 2000.
The column was called Grab Bag only to readers of The Chronicle, which began carrying it in its Sunday Punch section in 1968.
In other towns, it went by other names: Checking Up, Draw Up a Chair, or Fact or Fancy. For millions of newspaper readers, it went with a cup of coffee like cream and sugar.
Throughout the country, he was known as L.M. Boyd, but at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he started the column in 1963, he used the pen name "Mike Mailway."
Grab Bag was a celebration of the offbeat, the unexpected and the gloriously mundane, packaged with deliberate randomness.
Grab Bag often featured the occasional asides of "Our Love and War Man," a character that presented items developed by him with his wife, Patricia.
Mr. Boyd was "Love" and his wife "War" -- although Patricia maintained it was the other way around -- he told Chronicle writer Sam Whiting in 2000. The couple met in 1960, when Mr. Boyd was writing a column for the Houston Chronicle called Dial Watchem, which fielded reader complaints about broken signs and potholes. He had hired Patricia as an assistant. They were married 45 years and had six children.
"If you've been married continuously to the same partner for more than 9.4 years, congratulations -- your marriage has lasted longer than the U.S. average." -- Grab Bag, June 19, 1986.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I used to read Boyd's column everyday.
Back in the bad ol good days I would read him right after finishing up Herb Caens' column..
awwwwwwww! i started reading him when i was a kid and loved his column!!! if you do a search there is a site with a lot of his stuff on it. i love going there and reading! RIP L.M. Boyd! :(
Me too. Those were good newspapering days. Art Hoppe was another good read back then.
Hoppe died three years to the day after the death of his friend and fellow Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, who frequently called Hoppe ``a genius -- and an unsung one at that.''
Source
Thank you! Did not know that.
It is only thru the good graces of LM Boyd that I came to know of the Andorran defense budget of 1972: 5 dollars.
Rest in peace.
Our local KIEMTV weather guy, Jim Bernard, quotes a Boyd item once or twice a week.
I'm sure Boyd would have a stat to place his death in perspective...
I did, too. Did his columns start out with, "Things I wouldn't know if I never opened my mail," or am I thinking of someone else?
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