Edward Lee Boyd

Edward Lee Boyd, 91 years old, died on May 8, 2024. He was born on November 27, 1932 in Mexico, Missouri. He was the only child of Lee Moore and Billy Richter Boyd. At the time of his birth his father was the mayor of Laddonia Missouri and operated a CONOCO gasoline station in the town and his mother was a homemaker. As the depression deepened the family moved to an eighty acre farm about one mile outside of town. Besides farming, Lee Boyd operated a steam tractor and thrashing machine in the area, and Ed's mother supplied the town with eggs, chickens, and dairy products. Ed entered school in Laddonia, spending the after school hours with his grandmother and great-grandmother.
In the fall of 1941, with the farm failing the family moved west to Spokane, Washington where Lee Boyd worked at Sears and went to night school to learn aviation mechanics, and Billy Boyd worked as a waitress at the Davenport Hotel. Ed was a "latch-key kid". In the fall of 1942 the family moved to Great Falls, Montana where both Lee and Billy worked at the Air Force Base. In 1943 Ed's grandmother came to live with the family so Ed was no longer a latch-key kid.
The Boyds were transferred back to Spokane in 1944 to work at the Air Force base there. In 1945 Lee quit the job with the Air Force, and the family moved to Tacoma, Washington. Billy continued to work for the Air Force. In May 1946 Lee Boyd died on the operating table of complications due to a heart problem which was the result of rheumatic fever he had had as an infant. Ed was given a job, illegally, at the Tacoma Sash and Door where his father had worked, so that his mother did not have to worry about him while she worked. The job was summers only while Ed was in high school..
In the fall of 1949 his mother remarried to William Falk who was in Tacoma for the construction of the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Near the end of Ed's last semester at Stadium High School in Tacoma the family moved back to Trenton, New Jersey, Ed did not then graduate from high school because he did not complete the last semester. Stadium did send a diploma a year later!
As part of the marriage agreement Bill Falk paid for Ed's college education at Lehigh University. Ed graduated in 1954 with a BA in Physics and went to work at BEVA Labs, a small electronics company in Trenton as chief engineer. BEVA Labs was failing financially and Ed applied for Naval Officers Candidate School. The owner of BEVA Labs found out and fired Ed!
The Navy school would not start for six months and Ed needed a job so he found a position with Associated Engineers of Agawam, Mass. who were expecting to get a government contract. They placed Ed as a temp with a small company which was embarking on an expansion, IBM, at Poughkeepsie New York. This was in the magnetics group of the research department.
Associated Engineers did not get the government contract but Ed was hired by IBM. He stayed there 35 years. He worked in research from 1955 to 1964, publishing 14 papers in refereed physics journals. He made the first single crystal thin films of permalloy. He was involved in the planning and the move to the research lab at Yorktown Heights, NY. He spent a year a Watson Labs at Columbia University. He studied the nuclear magnetic resonance in magnetic materials. In 1964 he transferred to the systems division in Poughkeepsie working on the last core memory in IBM computers. and the core memory which was the backup for the new semiconductor memory. During his time at IBM Ed participated in the evolution of electronics from vacuum tubes and discrete resistors and capacitors to integrated circuits.
In 1957 Ed enlisted in the U. S. Army Reserves and served eight years including active duty at the Army Chemical Center, Edgewood, MD working on radiation effects from nuclear weapons. He also worked on Sun Rise Semester an educational program on CBS TV.
In recognition of his pioneering work in magnetism Ed was asked to go to Kyoto University in Japan in 1966. While there he lectured at several universities from Hiroshima to Saporo and received an honorary doctorate.
On July 26, 1969, Ed married Irene Howe Crossman at St Paul's Episcopal Church in Poughkeepsie, New York. He went into management and never published another paper. He managed groups in the area of semiconductor devices. In 1976 he was appointed to the IBM Corporate Technical Committee in Armonk NY, responsible to the chairman of the board for all technology practiced in IBM. He left that position in 1979 to go to Boca Raton working on printers and what became IBM PC.
In 1980 Ed returned to Fishkill, managing a group doing device modeling and studying the effects of radiation on semiconductors. He then became an internal consultant on a variety of issues to finish out his career. Since his primary output was presentations, when he got a PC, he got an X-Y plotter to make foils for presentations. He asked for the software to connect the PC to the plotter and was told there was none, so between Thanksgiving and Christmas, he wrote a program to do this job. It was used for several years.
Ed and Irene worked together on the Crossman and Boyd genealogies and spent several delightful years tracing the roots of their families all over New England and down into Virginia and North Carolina.. In the late 1980's Ed and Irene bought a small house " Wippastry Cottage" on 10 acres in Earlville, NY as a getaway. When Ed retired after 35 years at IBM in 1990 they moved to Earlville. Irene devoted her time to community affairs and Ed volunteered at Camp Georgetown teaching prisoners mathematics. Ed enjoyed walking by the Chenango river photographing the wildlife. He also enjoyed maintaining the property.
He is survived by a daughter, Sloane (Robert) Thompson, and a son, Ashton (Kristina) Boyd, and four grandchildren, Matthew and Nathan Thompson, and Alia and Circe Boyd.
As per Ed's request, no funeral or memorial services will be held. He will be buried next to his beloved wife, Irene, in the Lick Creek Cemetery, Perry, Missouri.