Gary Boykin, ‘perfect’ husband, saw good in everyone

In the picture, the Boykin brothers, Gary and Bryan, stand outside, in the snow, over a 4-gallon pot of boiling oil. Gary, the oldest, is hoisting a golden turkey, fried to perfection, from the pot.

The two men smile. It is Super Bowl Sunday and they are living Gary’s motto, that life be lived to its fullest and funnest because time on Earth, no matter how long, is too short.

“We’re here for good time, not a long time,” was Gary’s favorite saying. He said it all the time, at the lake in the summer, to his 4-year-old daughter, Julia, at his in-laws’ Newport home where Gary, 32, and his wife, Elizabeth, 27, loved to go for big family gatherings. It’s not just a saying, Elizabeth says. Gary meant it, which is why that statement that so many took so lightly now seems so prophetic.

Gary Boykin died unexpectedly Nov. 16 after a stroke stemming from a debilitating infection. The final two months of 2005 had seemed custom tailored for a guy here for a good time. Gary’s brother, Bryan, and sister in-law, Jamie, had their first child just hours after Gary was admitted to the hospital on Nov. 15. Thanksgiving was just a week away, Christmas a month later and then Dec. 27, the expected due date of Gary and Elizabeth’s second child.

“He was great,” Elizabeth said. “All my friends always told me, ‘you’re so lucky to have a husband like Gary.’ He was perfect.”

Gary and Elizabeth met in 1997 almost by accident. It was July. Elizabeth had graduated from Newport High school that spring, and she was hanging out at Deep Lake with some girlfriends. The girls were looking for a boat ride. They spotted a guy who had promised them one earlier and asked him to make good on his offer. He refused, but he said he had some friends on Jet Skis that he’d send by.

Gary pulled up on his personal watercraft a short time later. Elizabeth got on the back, and the couple’s life journey began. In no time, Gary was sure Elizabeth was the one. Almost immediately Gary started joking with Janet Young, Elizabeth’s mother that he planned to marry the girl from the lake.

“Not without a ring, Gary,” Janet Young would tell him. The entire Young family, Elizabeth’s parents, Janet and Delbert, and her seven siblings, loved Gary. It was hard not to. Gary saw the good in everybody. People who would grate on Elizabeth were accepted by Gary just as they were.

“Gary always wanted to please everyone,” his mother, Judy Boykin, said. “He was just so much like his dad.”

Judy and Gene Boykin raised their two boys on a forested hillside on Campbell Road northwest of Otis Orchards with three generations of family around them. Gary’s grandfather lived in a mobile home just down the driveway. His uncle and cousins lived close by. Separated in age by just 22 months, Gary and Bryan were more like twins, their parents say.

Gary was born with a heart condition that required surgery when he was 5 years old. It didn’t slow him down, but it did affect his size, closing the maturity gap between him and Bryan. Gary had Bryan’s height but not his weight. Gary weighed less than 170 pounds as an adult and rarely added a pound to his flat stomach. Elizabeth used to joke that she ate because she liked to, but Gary ate to survive.

But there was more connecting Gary and Bryan than height. They were both sports fanatics and wound up living across the street from each other. Both drove trucks for compressed gas companies and were also very intuitive about each other’s intentions.

Bryan remembers one fall stumbling upon two bucks in the woods above his parents’ home. He was close enough to hear the bucks’ antlers clicking as the two animals fought. But Bryan wasn’t close enough to see the animals and get a good shot with his rifle. The ground was too crunchy with frost for him to approach the animals without scaring them off. Bryan knew, though, that it would only be a matter of time before Gary came up the hill hunting. The younger brother sat in a hole motionless until he heard someone who sounded like Gary, and then he flushed the deer toward the footsteps he’d heard.

Sure enough it was Gary, wearing the goofy Campbell’s Soup cap that he considered good luck.

In the picture taken on that day, Bryan and Gary pose with a five-point buck. The red hat on Gary’s head reads, “Ummm Ummm Good.”

The brothers’ other shared passion was basketball. Gene Boykin carved out a crude basketball court for his sons on a hillside behind their house. The dad recalls deliberately putting the court on a hillside so Gary and Bryan would get a good workout whenever a loose ball rolled several yards downhill to the road at the edge of the family’s land. Needless to say, Gary’s ball-handling skills were exceptional.

“Gary was one of those kids who lived for basketball,” says Rick Meddock, who coached the Boykin brothers at East Valley High School in the early 1990s. “He had a basketball in his hands constantly.”

Gene and Judy used to tease Gary about his basketball obsession, suggesting that in the event he ever married, his wife would have to look like a basketball or she’d starve for attention.

Elizabeth didn’t starve for attention, though, despite lacking the orange, dimpled complexion of NBA leather. She quickly became the No. 1 person in his life, at least, that is until their daughter Julia was born. Julia, or Juju-bean as Gary called her, was every bit her father’s shadow. Gary outfitted her in Carhartt pants so she was ready for anything.

“He took Julia everywhere he went,” Elizabeth said. “She’d help him drive our boat until she fell asleep.”

It was a young cousin who told Julia after Gary’s death that he’d gone to heaven and wouldn’t be coming home, which Gary’s 4-year-old girl seems to understand, though at times Elizabeth says her daughter forgets. Sometimes, the mother has to remind the child that Gary wont be back to drive their boat next summer, which is hard for everyone to comprehend.

For the longest time, if everyone was having a good time, it was because Gary was in the picture.