This signed first edition hardcover book was published in 1984 by Bill Boyd, Macon Telegraph & News with 160 pages. The text is unmarked. Signed with a general inscription "Happy Reading" on the front free endpaper. The binding is sound though the front hnge is starting to weaken. No dust jacket. It was a sight I will not soon forget. The floor of the huge Macon Coliseum was almost filled with elderly people who had come to Bill Boyd's first 80-and-Over Birthday Party. And there among them, doing his best to comply with all the requests for autographs, was OF Boyd.Most newspaper people nowadays, in an era of strong anti-press sentiment, wonder if they ought to duck when a stranger approaches. Bill gets ready for fan worship.The popularity of this ex-Marine who didn't begin column-writing until he approached midlife is truly remarkable. It is due in part to the sort of guy he is and in part to the sorts of columns he writes, and the two, of course, are closely interrelated.Those who know Bill only through his five-a-week columns in the Macon Telegraph and News probably would agree with my favorite description of him as a self-described redneck who keeps things interesting with occasional lapses into fits of liberalism.His columns reflect the basic values he learned during a tough growing-up period as one of 18 children of a sharecropper in Oklahoma and Texas. His writings preach the virtues of honesty, hard work, patriotism, self-reliance, decency and loyalty. His tone ranges from blazing anger to tender compassion. His subjects are mostly decent, law-abiding folks who otherwise get their names in the paper only when they are born, get married and die.Perhaps what distinguishes Bill from a lot of other writers is the relationships he develops with the people he writes about. His is not the hit-and-run interview approach. The subject of a Boyd column often becomes a lifelong Boyd friend or admirer, or both.After he did a prize-winning series of stories about Mennonites in nearby Macon County, several of them spent a long day helping Bill, Mar-valene and son Joe move into their first home. He carried on a shameless and blatant three-year "love affair" with "Miss Cleo" (she's in the book), the adopted "grandmother" of the Atlanta Braves, before she died in April 1982 at age 101. After an initial column about a three-year-old victim of leukemia, Bill stayed close to the family until the boy's tragic death two years later, calling the mother at 2 a.m. in a Memphis hotel room because there was no phone in the child's hospital room. Bill still carries a scar on his leg—the result of a chainsaw injury sustained while helping a correspondent's husband cut firewood. He constantly drops into nursing homes, just to chat with the elderly residents, many of whom have been mentioned in his articles.His is ajournalism of the heart, and it mostly came naturally. Bill's only formal journalistic training was in high school. He worked parttime for sev¬eral papers during 20 years in the Marines, then joined The Macon Tele¬graph as a roving photo journalist in 1973. His aggressiveness and gregariousness led to the development of numerous sources and a flood of photos and stories, and soon he was state news editor. In December 1977 he began writing a column for the Saturday paper. He expanded it to twice a week, adding Sundays, in late 1980, and as awards began to come in and the fan mail grew, he went to fulltime column-writing in early 1982.During 1984 he will make more than 100 speeches, receive from 1,500 to 2,500 cards and letters (some 500 will relate to his 80-and-Over Club), and answer upwards of 3,500 phone calls at the office and at home.Yet he will find time to do countless favors for his friends, because he is a person who genuinely likes his fellow human beings. That is obvious to anyone who reads his columns regularly, and I suspect that that, more than any other single thing, explains his success.Billy WatsonGeneral ManagerThe Macon Telegraph and News

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