L. M. Boyd

Who was L. M. Boyd?

Louis Malcolm Boyd, popularly known as L. M. Boyd was a newspaper columnist whose nationally syndicated column was a collection of miscellaneous trivial and amusing facts.

Boyd was raised in Chimacum and Bremerton, Washington. He joined the Army at the age of 16 and worked for the Stars and Stripes.

After having worked at the Spokesman-Review, the New York Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, and the Houston Chronicle, in 1963 he moved to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he began his trivia column.

The column ran locally under the name Mike Mailway, the name Mailway having been derived from the digits in Boyd's telephone number at the Post-Intelligencer. In 1968 it was picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle, where it was renamed The Grab Bag, the name by which it is most commonly known, though it ran under other titles in other markets. It eventually appeared in nearly 400 newspapers. 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 his wife Patricia maintained it was the other way around -- he told Chronicle writer Sam Whiting in 2000.