Covid has given me time to sort through everything, everywhere, in our house. In the basement are boxes of old letters and Christmas cards, mementos from my childhood, music and recital programs from my violin teaching days, old school papers. And a newspaper article from the Boulder Daily Camera, Friday, December 16, 1983: "The Stencil Man: Business is looking up for bicycling painter Larry Boyce."
June, 1980, I was less than a week into what would be a 3000-mile adventure from Boulder, Colorado, to San Francisco. I was traveling alone, and struggling. I'd blown out my knee trying to climb over Trail Ridge Road, in Rocky Mountain National Park, without training. I had to hitch a ride to the top. I'd already had a flat tire. I was carrying way too much stuff, including books for my entire summer's reading. I hitched a ride to meet a friend somewhere in Wyoming and took a day off to ice my knee. My friend dropped me off south of the Tetons.
When I got to Jackson Hole I met another cyclist. He told me where he was camping inside the national park and to look for the site with the bicyclists. I rode into the campground and easily found the group of cyclists who were all very welcoming. I probably had my tent set up when two other cyclists cruised in, one of them saying, very confidently, "Here are the cyclists." He had that air of the experienced cyclist and he captured the attention of all of us younger, less experienced riders.
He told us he was a traveling painter and his partner was a bicyclist who he had recently recruited to work with him because, "I got tired of partners who didn't want to bicycle with me so I decided to find a bicyclist who would paint with me." His partner was carrying a pot of beans that had been soaking all day on the back of his bike. And they both were riding while listening to music on their walkmans, a novelty in those days.
I don't know if I would have remembered this fellow's name if not for the newspaper article that I noticed several years later. And I don't remember his partner's name. But I always remembered Larry Boyce with his air of confidence and the pot of beans his partner carried on the back of his bike so they could cook them up for dinner that night.
I don't know why I saved that 1983 article, but so many years later I pulled it out to read, before putting it with so much else of what I had found in those boxes, in the trash. Then I thought, why not google Larry Boyce and see if he's still riding around the country painting Victorian houses?
Collector's Weekly, on Sept. 7, 2018, published an article on Larry Boyce, his work and his life. If you are an artist, a bicyclist, have an interest in home decor, or just like a good story, you'll enjoy this: https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/paint-pedaler/
Sadly, Larry Boyce passed away from AIDS in 1992.
