A. Walker Boyd | Obituaries
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NAVASOTA, TEXAS –
Mr. A. Walker Boyd of Navasota, Texas, ended a long and productive life surrounded by family and friends at his son’s home in Galveston, Texas on July 1, 2021. Walker died at the age of 92 and survived on his four children Austin W., Tim, Carolyn and Laxson Boyd, ten grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and his younger brother Wallis Boyd. He is preceded in death by his wife Jody Calvin Boyd, parents Austin Mac and Cora Boyd, sister Emma Onata Boyd, brothers Nolan, Robert and Dub Boyd and his first grandson Austin Robert Boyd. Walker lived life to the fullest, born at his Eureka, Texas home six months prior to the Great Depression, and raised to pursue a career as a farmer away from the family farm with responsibilities around the world.
A 1952 BS graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, Walker moved to Galveston on the Texas Gulf Coast, where he met his future wife, Joanna (Jody) Calvin, and entered the petrochemical industry in Texas City, Texas. A quick series of promotions took him to executive positions at Union Carbide in Texas City and Syracusa, Sicily. He made significant civic contributions to the La Marque, Texas school committee, where he was elected president to guide the city’s schools through the racial integration challenges of the late 1960s. Walker and his family took up farm life in Hurricane, West Virginia, after being promoted to the Union Carbide Business Team in Charleston, and later returned to Texas to serve as assistant plant manager at his company’s chemical plant in Seadrift, Texas. Each move brought a new farm or ranch as he combined his love of the land with his significant chemical plant management skills. Walker and his family moved to Sistersville, West Virginia in 1976, where he served the next 10 years as plant manager at Union Carbide’s St. Mary’s silicone plant, and eventually retired after 37 years. Walker then pursued a variety of interests including ranching and management teaching at Marietta College, Ohio, after which he became plant manager for a chemical company in Moundsville, WVA and his final industrial adventure to build and build an oxo plant in Charallave, Venezuela start .
In 1993, Walker returned to Sistersville, where he and Jody had a wonderful cattle ranch on 700 acres of one mile riverside hill country in Tyler County, West Virginia. His love of land and industry found a dream mix in his longtime home in West Virginia. Walker never rested and often said that “hard work is the essence of the good life,” so he focused on raising Angus cattle and the thousands of square bales of hay it would take to feed them after the work in the chemical industry was now put aside. Walker wasn’t one to slow down, adding real estate to his focus in 1994 with the purchase and renovation of the 100-year-old historic Wells Inn in Sistersville and dozens of other properties in the city, including Jody’s pride and joy – the Townhouse Art real Gallery. His love of reading and his passion for collecting books led to the creation of a used bookstore and over 10,000 titles that he collected – and read. After Jody’s death in 2006, Walker retired from West Virginia and transplanted to the West Texas community of Comstock to care for his daughter Dr. To help Carolyn Boyd build Shumla, a nonprofit company (founded in 1998) that has drawn the attention of archaeologists around the world with the preservation and documentation of 4,000 year old Pecos River petroglyphs – the oldest “books” in North America. Walker has built more buildings in his life than any of us can count, including houses and art studios and barns and educational facilities for Shumla and his many ranches and farms. Armed with his Sawzall, a hammer and loyal suspenders, he was always creating something new.
Walker liked to go. In 1968, he and Jody started a family destination to hike the Appalachian Trail, an accomplishment not typical of mid-1960s families. Over the next decade, they migrated hundreds of miles through the forests of Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. For the decades that followed, Walker walked five miles a day, even 42 miles a day in his 70s. Perhaps most notable was his return to the Appalachian Trail with the NWES Hiking Club of Navasota at ages 87, 88, and 90, where he hiked well-known ancient trails including Great Smoky Mountain National Park well beyond Hot Springs, North Carolina. Walker never gave up and, after many falls, struggled to keep going despite the difficulty of the challenge. That was an important lesson all of his children learned from him.
Walker Boyd will be remembered for the coming months at intimate celebrations of his life in Galveston, Texas, at his son’s ranch in Navasota, Texas, and later in Comstock, Texas. Instead of flowers or other gifts, please remember him by contributing to the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center, which he worked so tirelessly with his daughter (www.shumla.org). Long after Walker is forgotten, the work he did to preserve the millennia-old written history of Texas’ earliest residents will be a testimony to “hard work … and the essence of the good life”.
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