The Boykin Boy: A Memoir

The Boykin Boy is a truly unique, heartwarming and sometimes humorous novelized memoir that details the life of an orphan boy during the Great Depression of the 1930s as he travels from the cotton fields of Texas to an isolated working ranch in Wyoming.

The story begins with the Boykin boy’s early childhood and youth, and entertainingly continues to the end of his high school years. In early childhood the boy was subjected to the cruelty of the migrant workers’ lives and witnessed the horrors of his parent’s ways of dealing with the difficulties.

At age twelve he was abandoned by his father and permanently separated from his mother and eleven brothers and sisters. All this, plus earlier abuse from his father’s insane alcoholic rages, left the boy scarred in his body and mind. But the boy’s enthusiasm for life remained strong. Learning to read and write at the age of twelve, finishing grade and high school, and earning a college degree all in just ten short years, are accomplishments more privileged children seldom dream about. With incredibly hard work, ambition, persistence, curiosity and the desire to learn, the boy became a man of responsibility, honor and respect.

The life of this boy and man is a perfect contradiction to the weak and evasive attitude, My parents made me do it. Bad parents, broken bones, partial deafness and stuttering will not stop a determined boy from becoming an honorable and successful man!