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affairs,” Elder said, “but I spend a lot of
my time on the top of mountains, just
looking around, where there’s no dis-
tractions, no telephone poles, no trains,
no people, no cell phone service.”
He was born Harold Boyd Elder at
Southwestern General Hospital in El
Paso on Jan. 12, 1944, to Hal Elder of
Bogota, Texas, and Billye Lee Bell Elder
of Valentine.
Hal was an artist, leather worker, car
collector and mechanic, tennis player,
wanna-be golfer, and actor (the banjo-
picking professional gong-ee on “The
Gong Show” in the late ‘70s). Billye had
been a public-school special education
and physical education teacher with the
El Paso Independent School District for
38 years when she retired.
Boyd’s younger brothers, Kenneth
Mack Elder and Howard Stanton Elder,
were born at the same hospital.
Boyd once described himself as an
artistic child, “cursed with the blessing”
of a vivid imagination. He grew up in El
Paso, but he and his brothers spent as
much time as they could in Valentine
on the Bell family ranch, including
many weekends, holidays and every
summer.
Elder attended and studied art at El
Paso’s Burges High School. He played
hooky for a few months in his junior
year on a road trip with friends to
Louisiana. Upon returning, he was sent
to El Paso Tech (“Where all the kids
who got thrown out of all the other
high schools went,” his brother Mack,
said).
Outside the classroom, Elder studied
at the El Paso Museum of Art with
noted local artists including Jan Herring
and Wiltz Harrison. He also continued
experimenting with other non-classical
mediums and techniques, including
pin-striping hot rods and motorcycles
belonging to friends, among them Billy
Gibbons, the future Rev. Billy F.
Gibbons of ZZ Top.
High school hijinks notwithstand-
ing, Elder won numerous art awards
and then a partial scholarship from the
Texas Art Association. In 1963 he was
accepted at both Art Center Los
Angeles and the Disney-affiliated
Chouinard Art Institute in downtown
L.A.
“When I went to L.A. … to pick up
my scholarship papers at Art Center,
they told me I couldn’t wear shorts, and
26
Photo of Boyd Elder courtesy of Barbara FG , www.barbarafg.com
Cenizo
First Quarter 2019