Patricia M. Boyd

Patricia (Pat) M. Boyd, who worked in the Lab’s Technical Information Department (TID), died of cancer at her home in Berkeley, Calif., on March 18. She was 76.

Born in Lincoln, Neb., on Nov. 28, 1933, she was the first child of Marie Kreikenbaum Boyd and George McDill (“Huck”) Boyd. The Boyd family was long prominent in Kansas politics and newspaper publishing. Her paternal grandmother, Mamie Alexander Boyd, founded the Kansas Native Sons and Daughters and early on gave Patricia a membership.

Boyd graduated from Kansas State University with a bachelor’s degree in physical sciences in 1954 and received a master’s degree in business from Santa Clara University in 1980.

Boyd married William Hiss in 1954. She worked as a real estate agent and broker in Albuquerque for a number of years before moving with her husband to California in 1975. The couple divorced in 1977. After a long acquaintance and sharing many mutual friends, she and Robert R. (Bob) Piper became domestic partners in the 1990s.

In 2009, she was a featured speaker at the opening of the Boyd family archives at Kansas State University.

She was employed for a number of years as a technical writer and editor, first at the NASA Institute for Advanced Computation (IAC), then at Amdahl. During this period, she was also raising her two younger children and studying for her MBA. At IAC, in pre-Internet days, she was introduced to computers. During the last 20 years of her career, she worked full time for TID and later part time for other departments at LLNL.

At various times, she was secretary of a ski club in Livermore and co-led monthly hikes with Piper for the Outdoor Dilettantes, a sub-group of San Francisco Mensa. She occasionally helped proofread the newsletter of the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club and, for a time, was editor of Trails, the newsletter of the California Alpine Club. She enjoyed hosting large gatherings for live jazz and good food.

Boyd is survived by her domestic partner, Bob Piper, of Berkeley; her daughter, Lisa Willow of Albuquerque, N.M.; her daughter, Amy Hiss Reynolds and husband Patrick of Davis, Calif.; her son Eric W. Hiss and wife Heike of San Francisco; four grandchildren, Benjamin Willow, Finn and Aria Hiss, and Cooper Conwell Reynolds; a niece, Anne Brockhoff and family of Linwood, Kan; a nephew, Thomas Krauss and family of Russell, Kan.; and a number of cousins.