The Harold V. Boyle Papers are useful primarily for the light they shed on Boyle's activities as a correspondent during World War II and the Korean War. The collection also contains good material relating to his career during the immediate post-World War II years, but documentation of the remainder of Boyle's career as a syndicated columnist is only fragmentary. The collection consists chiefly of correspondence, speeches and writings, and notes. There are also small amounts of biographical material, financial records, official memoranda, and photographs.
BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL includes newspaper clippings which mention Boyle and several published letters to the editor concerning his columns.
The CORRESPONDENCE is somewhat disappointing with regard to both its amount and unbalanced content. While there is only a limited amount of important personal correspondence (principally for the war years), other periods are documented solely by relatively larger amounts of reader mail.
Included with the World War II era correspondence are three dozen letters to Mrs. Boyle from her husband which are full of gossipy news about his activities and those of other correspondents including Ernie Pyle, Don Whitehead and Wes Gallagher. Information on this period is supplemented by an unpublished manuscript of Boyle letters written in 1942 and 1943 and edited by John Tebbel. No letters included in this manuscript are to be found with the original correspondence. The letters dating from the Korean War era constitute a small amount of the total correspondence, and there is only one lengthy letter from Boyle. Of some interest are the frequent letters from Mrs. Boyle to her husband which contain news about AP employees. Scattered throughout the correspondence are letters to and from other correspondents and AP officials such as Ed Kennedy, J. Frank Starzel, William Lawrence, Bem Price, John Evans, and William Corley. Comments from Sid Caesar, General Courtney Hodges and Ethel Merman are included with the reader mail Boyle received. Only a limited number of his replies to this mail are to be found in the collection.
The bulk of the collection consists of Boyle's SPEECHES and WRITINGS which are divided into four categories: Columns, News, Magazine Articles, and Speeches and Interviews. Carbons of the stories drafted by Boyle during World War II and the Korean War comprise the sections News and Columns. In a few cases the draft copy he submitted to the military censor is included.
The news dispatches are arranged chronologically and identified by means of telegraphy format. Most releases were dated by Boyle with a two part number. For example, the date 7/5 refers to the seventh of May. In addition, most releases are identified with a five digit number. When the first digit is a zero, the release is one page in length; when the first digit is the number one, the release contains more than one page and the first part of the five digit number on each page corresponds to that page's sequence within the release. The last four numbers refer to the military time at which the release was sent. This number, which remains constant throughout a release, facilitates understanding of the manner in which the particulars of a news event were learned. It is not clear what portion of Boyle's total news output is represented in this collection, but where possible, obvious gaps within the run of original press dispatches have been supplemented with teletype versions of the missing stories.
During his career Boyle wrote several column series which changed in title although the human interest content remained similar. During the African campaign he began his famous column, “Leaves from a War Correspondent's Notebook.” After his transfer to the Pacific, he began a new series entitled “Marco Polo Abroad,” which documented his travels through the post-war world. After he returned to the United States in 1946 Boyle recorded his domestic travels in a column sometimes referred to as “Marco Polo at Home.” This series ended about July, 1947, when Boyle began “The Poor Man's Philosopher.” Except for the revival of the correspondent's notebook format during the Korean conflict, this column continued until his retirement. With the above exception, the column series, as well as several sub-series instituted during World War II, are arranged in chronological order.
Boyle was somewhat inconsistent about dating his columns, frequently identifying a column solely by its order within a series or subseries. These two devices have been combined in order to arrange the columns in each series into a close approximation of chronological order. The researcher is warned, however, that because Boyle sometimes wrote more than one column per day and because of gaps, the columns do not mesh together perfectly. Where possible, teletype copies (which were primarily dated according to when the column was to appear in print rather than when it was written) have been inserted to fill gaps within the run of original dispatches. Of “The Poor Man's Philosopher,” only the columns written before June, 1948, are dated; the remainder, which constitute only a fraction of Boyle's total career output, are undated and arranged alphabetically by subject.
The majority of Boyle's wartime columns focused on the life of the ordinary soldier, but the collection also includes interesting opinions about Generals George S. Patton, Jr., and Omar N. Bradley whom Boyle observed closely. A similar interest in the life of the ordinary citizen characterized Boyle's peacetime columns, but he also interviewed prominent individuals upon occasion. The subject file “People” inclues columns on Harry Truman, the Duke of Windsor, Milton Berle, and Arthur Miller.
Also included with the column materials is a file of miscellaneous feature articles chiefly dating from the World War II period which were not part of Boyle's regular column series.
The section SPEECHES and WRITINGS also includes a file of scripts from several radio interviews, speeches chiefly on military matters, and one folder of articles published in various magazines.
FINANCIAL RECORDS constitute one folder of expense account statements submitted to the AP during World War II and the Korean War and an incomplete run of salary check receipts, 1951-1953.
The section OFFICIAL MEMORANDA is a small file of instructions from the War Department regarding the status of war correspondents and some instructions from the AP to its correspondents.
NOTES include 40 tablets containing interview notes and column ideas. All of these notebooks are unidentified and undated, although they appear to relate chiefly to the World War II period. Also included is a small amount of unbound notes, also unidentified and undated. All of these materials are handwritten and difficult to decipher.
The PHOTOGRAPHS in the collection include images of a man (possibly Boyle) at a typewriter, and soldiers drinking, eating, and smoking in a cargo plane.
