The First Son

The Boyer Family with New #5, Todd Marshall 

(click here to read previous story:

Hospitals, Doctors and Surgeries)

It was in July of 1964, a couple of months after Sharon's 5th birthday, that Liz gave birth to their third child, a son they named Todd.

The +5 year gap between Sharon and Todd is notable because it's by far the largest: Diann is just 16 months older than Sharon, and Todd is only two years older than the youngest child, Scott.  Sharon's medical problems probably played a big part in the size of that gap.

"Liz was stressed, to say the least," Dinon said.  "I mean, I was stressed, too.  And there wasn't much I could do."

In that stressful time, Dinon did the best he could to help his family ... and sometimes had a little help, too.

"During Sharon's last kidney surgery, Diann and I had to come back [from Boston] to Ohio early because Diann was starting school," Dinon said.  "So, I'd get her up, and comb and braid her hair, but ... it was not the best."

Diann and her long hair, obviously
braided by her mother

It just so happened that, while walking to school, Diann and her neighbor friend Patty always went right past the house of one of their teachers.  On one of the mornings that Dinon braided her hair, the teacher looked out her front window and could tell that Diann's dad had, well, tried to help.

"So while Liz was gone, she'd watch for Diann to come walking by, and then she'd call them into the house and rebraid Diann's hair," Dinon said, chuckling.  "I didn't know anything about it, I mean, Diann never said anything and of course I didn't realize her hair was being rebraided."

In 1964, the family was finally healthy and resettled, just in time for the birth of Dinon's first son, Todd Marshall (his middle name came from Liz's maiden name).

When Dinon was asked if he was excited to finally have a boy, he smiled and shrugged.

"I think I just, y'know, accepted it, thinking, 'OK, I've got another child to feed'," he said.

However, Dinon's blasé answer was met with quick objection.

"Outstanding" Baby Todd

"That is NOT the story I heard from Mom," Todd broke in from across the table.  "Mom said that Dad was OVERjoyed, that he was THRILLED to finally have a boy, that his face lit up and he could barely contain his joy.  She would say, 'Your father, Todd, he's not really very expressive emotionally, but that was as happy as I've ever seen him.'  And I believe every word of it!"

"That's the mantra, uh-huh," Dinon said, chuckling.

Continuing to argue his infant likability, Todd retold a story from his pre-crawling days:

"At the house in Troy, there was a tree right in the middle of the front yard under which, Nanny [Liz's mother] said, that I used to just lay there under the tree and I would stare up and look at the leaves and just be totally content."

Dinon smiled and shrugged, genuinely assenting, "Yeah, he was an outstanding baby.  He was SO good."

Todd grinned. 

"You hear that?  I was OUTSTANDING."

(Next story: Ice Dancing in Troy)

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Dinon with his two 
small daughters

(click here to read previous story: Baby Diann)

At the beginning of April of 1959, Liz was more than 8 months pregnant with her and Dinon's second child, Sharon.  Shortly before she was due, Dinon made arrangements with his parents to take Diann home with them to Wisconsin for a couple of weeks so he and Liz could focus on bringing the new baby into the world.

When the time came for Liz to give birth, Dinon dropped her off at Akron General Hospital and went back to work ("I didn't think it was necessary for me to stay," he said).  Later that day, either April 14th or 15th, he decided to walk from work over to the hospital to see how it was going.  

Grandpa Ralph Boyer with
his granddaughter, Diann

"It was a very very warm day," Dinon said, describing an unseasonably hot mid-April afternoon, "and because I was so heated after walking, well, I got to the hospital and I fainted."

But he was brought back around pretty easily, and on April 15th Liz gave birth to their second daughter, Sharon Leigh.

Diann stayed with her grandparents for a few days after her sister's birth so that Liz and Dinon could more easily transition back home with the new baby.  After having had Diann for a total of 2-3 weeks, Ralph and Alma traveled back to Ohio to return Diann and to meet their newest granddaughter.

"When my parents brought her back, they came to the front door, ready to hand Diann back to me, and Diann didn't come!  She was not interested in coming to her father because she had bonded with my folks!" Dinon said.  "I mean, I was not ready for that.  I felt badly about it."

Grandpa Ralph Boyer with his
two small granddaughters

For Dinon, who is not an emotionally expressive person, such a sentiment is meaningful.  And to this day, of his four children, Dinon is still closest to his oldest daughter, Diann.

In 1960 or '61, Dinon was transferred, and the young family moved 200 miles from northeast Ohio to the town of Troy, just a little north of Dayton in midwestern Ohio.  The Boyers settled in well, everyone was healthy, Liz found a social circle that she enjoyed, and Dinon found a new hobby competing locally in ice dancing.

But in 1962, three-year-old Sharon developed a urinary tract infection.  And then another one.  And another one.  Antibiotics would temporarily clear up the infections, but they always returned. So they made an appointment at a nearby hospital, the first of many.

(Next story: Hospitals, Doctors and Surgeries) 

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(Click here to read previous story:

New Wife, New Life)

After two years of marriage, baby Diann Elizabeth arrived as a belated Christmas present to her parents on December 26th of 1957.

Mama Liz and Baby Diann

"I was pretty happy about it," Dinon said.  "She was planned, I was through with grad school, and I was working for Goodrich.  We were living up in Cuyahoga Falls, which is next to Akron on the north side.  We were in a small apartment on the second floor of the house that we later bought, but, at the time, we were renting."

Since Dinon was the oldest child for his mother, who was herself an only child, this meant that Diann was a highly-celebrated first grandchild.  The abundance of baby photos, and the level of doting around Diann in each, speaks to the same.

Diann took after her father's light hair color and by her first birthday it hung in a thick blonde bowl above her chubby cheeks. For her birthday, Diann happily sat in a high chair at the same table her father had grown up around, and a big round cake, frosted in white, sat on the table with a single lit candle in the center.

Baby Diann with
Grandma Alma 'Babe' Boyer

"We were glad to have her," Dinon said.  "She was a pretty happy child."

Blessed with the financial stability of Dinon's job, the young family of three took a camping vacation to the Gaspé Peninsula in the autumn of 1958.

The Gaspé Peninsula, a piece of Canadian land northeast of the state of Maine, runs along the St. Lawrence River and ultimately overlooks the St. Lawrence Gulf. North of Maine, it is, as one might expect, rather cold in September.  However, this detail did not deter Liz from making sure that Diann remained clean on their camping trip.

"Liz was pregnant with Sharon when we were on vacation, and she didn't realize she was pregnant at the time.  And Liz, on that trip, Liz thought that the baby needed to be bathed every day, every single day," Dinon said, beginning to laugh.  "This is fall in Canada.  Picture Diann, bare as can be, and Liz is bundled up with a jacket and everything trying to stay warm, and then we've got Diann out there in a pan because she had to be bathed.  Liz and I laughed about that later – it’s a wonder Diann survived.  I mean, she didn't get sick or anything.   I mean, it's just [that Liz was a] new mother and she thought that that was the thing you had to do.  Oh golly..."

Baby Diann with
Great-Grandma Henness

Diann was also the only one of Liz's children to meet her father, Joseph Marshall, a handsome English immigrant with a beautiful singing voice.

Liz's parents, Joseph and Ernestine Marshall, had separated in September of 1942 due to infidelity on Joseph's part.  Liz, the youngest of four, was just eleven years old at the time.  The children continued to live with their mother when Joseph moved out; Liz did not maintain a close relationship with her father, even though both parts of the family lived near Boston.

Liz, Diann and Dinon
in front of their home
in Cuyahoga Falls, OH

"We did see her dad after Diann was born, Diann was just a little baby," Dinon recalled. "I think it was the first time I met him.  And he was remarried.  I do remember seeing him, and him holding Diann, but he died shortly thereafter."


In September of 1959, Joseph died at the age of 61.  "We didn't get a chance to go to the funeral because we were in Ohio and it was down in the Boston area," Dinon said.  In addition to the +650 miles and 21-month-old Diann, Dinon and Liz had also recently added a fourth member to their family.  Baby Sharon, born in April of '59, was just 5 months old at the time of Joseph's passing.  "At that stage, it was a big deal to travel that distance, so we just couldn't do it," Dinon said.  


After the news of Joseph's passing, the small Boyer family of four settled back into their routine in Cuyahoga Falls, OH, unaware of the coming medical challenges for their newest daughter.

(Next story: Family of Four)

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One thing I have learned to never under-estimate is the power of old family photos.  The emotional impact, and story-telling power, of a single photo is always incredible to me, even when the photos are of another person's family. So imagine how hard it was for me to breathe when one Saturday, in the middle of interviewing my 80-year-old grandfather, Dinon, he pulled out a photo album arranged by his mother.  

November 1931: Alma
and infant son Dinon

I felt my heart stop as I pulled back the cover to find black pages neatly arranged with photos and handwritten captions of my great-grandparents' courtship, wedding, honeymoon, and early marriage.  Even though I had the chance to meet both of my great-grandparents before they passed, Ralph and Alma (better known as "Babe") are little more to me than faint childhood recollections of a stoop-shouldered man and a tiny wrinkled woman.  But in the pages of that photo album I got to glimpse them at a time when they were my age, young and newly married.  In these photos, my great-grandfather's shoulders were straight and strong, and my great-grandmother was once an absolute knock-out.

According to notes in Babe's neat handwriting, she met my great-grandfather, Ralph Boyer, in their home state of Illinois on October 26th, 1927.  They were engaged the following August, and were then married in August of 1930 after Ralph graduated from the University of Wisconsin with his master's degree in Chemical Engineering.  Shortly after, he and Alma moved to Pittsfield, MA, a city 100 miles west of Boston, where he worked for General Electric in their plastics department.

Spring of 1932:
Ralph, Babe and Dinon

Their firstborn child was my grandfather, Dinon.  He was born on October 26, 1931 in Pittsfield.  He ended up as a belated birthday present, born the day after his mother's 23rd birthday.

The small Boyer family first lived in an apartment as they got on their feet, Ralph working as an engineer and Alma staying home with the baby.  "My mother remembers putting butter out on the window ledge in wintertime, because I’m not sure if they had a refrigerator at that time,” my grandfather said.

Dinon enjoyed a few years as the only child - his famously-pragmatic parents waited 5 years before their second child, and another 5 years after that before their third, so that they would only have to pay for one child's college tuition at a time.

In their defense, there were plenty of reasons why the pair was so frugal, even though Ralph was well-employed.  After all, both were born on farms in Illinois, and Babe's childhood farmhouse had a dirt floor.  And the economic climate of that era was far from comforting.

"You gotta remember, this was during the Depression, and although my dad always had a job there were a number of times that he took a pay cut," Dinon said.  "He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1930, so he was very fortunate that General Electric hired him.  The start of the Depression was 1929, so in 1930 it was tough.  And then I was born in 1931."

Whatever financial stresses his parents might've endured, my grandfather's memories of his childhood, even his very earliest ones, are of being happy, loved and provided for.

Before Dinon's first birthday, Babe and Ralph bought a new dining room table, the same table that Dinon inherited and later raised his own children around.

"My parents told me that one time I crawled under the table, and got balanced on my tummy so that I couldn't go forward or backward, I was just there," Dinon recounted, chuckling.  "There’s a piece in the middle under there, so, as a baby, I just crawled up in there, and I was stuck, and all I could do was cry.  I mean, I was just, there, couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go backward, I could flail my arms and all, but there was nothing that touching!  So I was rescued, y’know.”

He also remembers playing under the huge rhubarb leaves of his neighbor's victory garden behind their garage, and even attempting to ice skate before his fifth birthday.

“Of course, as a kid, I ice skated," Dinon said.  "I seem to remember doing some ice skating when I lived in Pittsfield ... It was kind of on a little stream.  The ice was curved, it was low in the middle and came up on both sides, which made it a little hard to skate.  And, of course, my skates were not the professional kind, and therefore, my ankles were not strong enough to stay up, so they kept going out.  So it was hard to skate that way.  I can still picture that stream in my mind.”

Even his minor pre-school surgeries are remembered by my grandfather mostly for the pleasant memories of the healing. 

“I had my tonsils out when I was very young, I don’t know what age, but I still remember, after having the tonsils out, wanting to suck chipped ice," Dinon said.  "And I had operations on both of my big toes [because I had ingrown toenails], and ... after the operation on my toes, I had them both wrapped, and my parents put me in a wagon.  I was very young, I think it was before I was in school, but it was in the summertime evidently because while I was healing, why they put me in a wagon and took me to where I could watch some houses being built.”

Around the time that Dinon turned 5 - and also close to the time that his brother, Daryll, was born - his father, Ralph, was transferred from the General Electric plant in Pittsfield to their plant in Lynn, MA, right on the Atlantic coast.  So, around 1936, the small Boyer family picked up and moved just east of Lynn, in a town on a tiny chicken-necked peninsula called Nahant.

(next story: Nahant, MA)

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