Claude Boyd

Growing Up in San Francisco and Other Stories: an Anecdotal Autobiography Claude Boyd

As a young boy growing up in California, Claude Boyd rode precariously down the famous San Francisco hills on homemade coasters made of doors and old roller skate wheels. As a teenager, he chased purse snatchers in his father's 1939 Graham Paige automobile. With such an adventurous beginning to his life, it's no surprise that Claude Boyd's autobiography is filled with many more lively anecdotes, one of which involves a fake turkey made from a brown paper bag and two turkey legs, placed in the street for some unsuspecting soul to discover on Thanksgiving. He describes his enlistment in the Army and his subsequent year spent in peacetime Korea, where his first assignment is to set up a prison library. After he earns his college degree, he eventually moves to Thule Air Force Base in northern Greenland, where he begins a new experience in the arctic tundra. Boyd concludes with the story of his transcontinental courtship and subsequent marriage that has lasted over fifty years. Combined with photographs, Claude Boyd's humorous true story captures the essence of what life was really all about before, during, and after World War II.