Trivia king L.M. Boyd, the P-I's 'Mike Mailway,' calls it quits for good

Beginning Monday, a new daily feature will replace it in Coffee Break. Titled "Mike Mailway Trivia Bits" and written by Stanley Newman, it will use a Q-and-A format different from Boyd's column but will focus on the same type of eclectic information.

Boyd, 77, began his column in the P-I, but it was eventually syndicated in hundreds of newspapers around the country. The casual compilation of obscure facts and interesting questions was so beloved that readers lured Boyd out of a previous, seven-month retirement when he first tried to leave in 2000.

"We kept getting whole boxes full of mail: 'Do you have to quit?' 'Why can't you do something?' " said Patricia Boyd, his wife and business partner. In response, they produced "From the Files of Mike Mailway," a mix of reprints and updated items.

This time, health problems have led to Boyd's retirement, and his wife said she expected it to stick. The couple will remain in Seattle, though, in their Magnolia home with views of the mountains and Puget Sound.

"There's nowhere else on Earth that would be that good," Patricia Boyd said.

Louis Malcolm Boyd ("Mal" to his friends) was a newspaperman in Houston when he began writing an "action line" column answering readers' questions. The P-I recruited him in 1963 to start the "Mike Mailway" column, a mix of troubleshooting and trivia. (The "Mailway" name was based on the letters in his telephone number at the P-I.)

The couple left the P-I in 1967 to syndicate the column, which used Boyd's own name in other newspapers but remained "Mike Mailway" in the P-I.

It was a grab bag: The name of the Bing cherry came from a Chinese gardener, Boyd said in one of his final columns. The heart of a newborn baby weighs less than an ounce, he noted in another ("What makes the heart heavy comes later," he added). And often, there would be a dispatch from "the Love and War man," which he joked was a reference to himself and his wife: "Her line is that she's War and I'm Love."

Boyd's column tone was deliberately upbeat, likable and witty.

"It was just a cup-of-coffee column, a friendly thing to pick up in the morning and see what Mike Mailway had to say," his wife said. And it had staying power as well as an inimitable appeal. Even if other writers had taken the same raw facts, his wife said, they wouldn't have been able to reproduce the Mailway style.

"He's a hell of a good writer, for one thing," she said.

"He could take an item that was absolutely nothing, and make it say something."

P-I reporter Rebekah Denn can be reached at 206-448-8190 or rebekahdenn@seattlepi.com

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