Sandra Keith Boynton (born April 3, 1953) is an American humorist, songwriter, director, music producer, children's author, and illustrator. Boynton has written and illustrated over seventy-five books for children and seven general audience books,[1] as well as over four thousand greeting cards, and five music albums. She has also designed calendars, wallpaper, bedding, stationery, paper goods, clothing, jewelry, and plush toys for various companies.
Early life and education
The third of the four daughters of Jeanne (née Ragsdale) and Robert W. Boynton, Sandra was born in Orange, New Jersey, and grew up in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia.[2] Her father was a noted progressive educator, scholar (collaborating on textbooks with Shakespearean scholar Maynard Mack), and publisher and co-founder of Boynton/Cook Publishers. Boynton/Cook Publishers is now owned by Heinemann.
Boynton's parents became Quakers when she was two years old. From kindergarten through 12th grade, she and her sisters attended Germantown Friends School, where their father taught English and was Head of the Upper School. Boynton has frequently cited Germantown Friends' arts-centered curriculum as central to her own "upbeat offbeat" sensibility as well as its thorough integration of the values of pacifism, independent inquiry, and individualism. She also spent part of her 10th grade year at Ackworth School near Pontefract, England.
Boynton studied Latin for five years in high school, mostly in order to avoid science classes, the scheduling of which invariably conflicted with Latin.
She went to Yale University, entering in 1970 in the college's second year of coeducation.[2] She spent the second semester of her junior year studying in Paris through Wesleyan University's program. At Yale, she majored in English and also sang sporadically with the Yale Glee Club. She had joined the Glee Club when additional singers were needed for a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. Boynton has described herself as "an enthusiastic but undistinguished alto".
At her graduation from Yale in 1974, she received a Special Master's Magna solemnly bestowed by Charles Davis, the Master of Boynton's residential college, Calhoun College. Unbeknownst to the graduation audience, the honor was actually a fiction. Boynton's grade point average did not in fact entitle her to any degree honor; but shortly before the ceremony, she had told Professor Davis in mock earnest that "my parents are here, so I'd really appreciate it if you could just mumble some Latin after my name".
Boynton intended to become a theater director. She attended the University of California, Berkeley for a year for graduate studies in drama, then transferred to the Yale School of Drama D.F.A. program, however she did not complete the program. With the birth of her first child in 1979, Boynton postponed indefinitely a career in the theater, judging the demands of that profession not easily compatible with raising a family.
Boynton's greeting card designs for Recycled Paper Greetings were at the forefront of the Alternative Cards commercial movement that began in the mid-1970s. According to RPG co-founder and president Mike Keiser, nearly 500 million copies of Boynton's distinctive humorous cards—featuring an assortment of unnamed cartoon animal characters, spare layout, and droll messages—sold between 1973 and 2003. The best known of these is a 1975 birthday card bearing images of four animals and the message "Hippo Birdie Two Ewes", a pun playing on the phrase "Happy Birthday to You". The card has sold over ten million copies to date.[3]
Books
Since the 1977 release of Hippos Go Berserk!, Boynton has published many children's books, as well as several illustrated humor books for the general market. Her books are most typically for very young children, offered in the laminated paperboard format known as board books. Nearly all of Boynton's books have been published by either Workman Publishing or Simon & Schuster. Four of her books have been New York Times best sellers: Chocolate: The Consuming Passion (1982); Yay, You! (2001); Consider Love (2002); and Philadelphia Chickens (2002), which reached the number one position on the list, and was on the list for nearly a year. Six Boynton books were on the 2001 Publishers Weekly All-Time Bestselling Children's Books list: Moo, Baa, La La La!, The Going to Bed Book, Barnyard Dance, A to Z, Blue Hat, Green Hat, and Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs!.[4] More than 85 million copies of her books have been sold.[citation needed]
Theater
In May 1995, Boynton wrote and directed a benefit reading, On Stage—featuring Jill Clayburgh, Joe Pacheco, and Jane Curtin—for Sharon Stage in Connecticut. In November 2005, and again in November 2007 she presented songs from Philadelphia Chickens, Dog Train, and Blue Moo at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage, co-hosting in 2007 with Davy Jones of the Monkees. In November 2006, she directed her son Keith in his own play, The Quotable Assassin, Off-Off-Broadway at Alternate Stages.
She has written the text for four choral pieces composed by Fenno Heath, Director Emeritus of the Yale Glee Club, all of which have been performed by the Yale Alumni Chorus on international tour.
In 2008, Boynton ventured into filmmaking, creating and directing music videos of her most popular recorded songs. Her first music video released in November 2009 as a book/DVD combination, was "One Shoe Blues", starring B.B. King and a cast of assorted sock puppets. Then she directed "Penguin Lament" starring John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting, "Philadelphia Chickens" which is mostly animation and includes cameos by Kevin Bacon and Michael Bacon, and "Be Like a Duck" which features all four of her children.
Awards
Boynton received the Irma Simonton Black Award for Chloe and Maude, the National Parenting Publications Gold Medal for Barnyard Dance[citation needed] and for Your Personal Penguin, a Grammy Award Nomination for Philadelphia Chickens, the Eustace D. Theodore Fellowship (Yale University), the National Cartoonists Society Greeting Card Award for 1992, and the National Cartoonists Society Book Illustration Award for Blue Moo: 17 Jukebox Hits From Way Back Never, in 2008. She is the 2008 recipient of the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Cartoonists Society's highest honor. Hippos Go Berserk! was awarded Mathical Hall of Fame status.[6]
She has received the following film festival awards for her film shorts: the Rhode Island International Film Festival Providence Prize 2010 for One Shoe Blues starring B. B. King; the Flickers North Country Film Festival 2010 Crystal Image Award for emerging artist, as director of all four films; the 2D or Not 2D Animation Festival 2011 Golden Pencil Award for Philadelphia Chickens; the Forster Film Festival 2012 Winner of Song Category for "Be Like a Duck"; and the Wilmette International Children's Film Festival 2012 Best of Fest Live Action Short Film Winner for One Shoe Blues.
Personal life
Boynton was married to writer and Olympic Bronze medalist (and fellow Yale graduate) Jamie McEwan from 1978 until his death from cancer in 2014.[2][7][8] In 1991, Boynton and McEwan moved with their children to the Hautes-Pyrénées region of France for a year so McEwan and his Whitewater Slalom doubles partner, Lecky Haller, could train with the French team for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. McEwan/Haller ended in 4th Place. McEwan was a member of several whitewater expeditions to Mexico, Bhutan, British Columbia, and a National Geographic–sponsored descent of part of the Tsang-Po River (Brahmaputra) in Tibet, an ill-fated trip detailed in The Last River by Todd Balf, and in Courting the Diamond Sow by expedition leader Wickliffe W. Walker. Boynton has illustrated two of McEwan's five children's books. They have four children: Caitlin McEwan, an actress and director; Keith Boynton, a playwright and filmmaker; Devin McEwan, a Whitewater Slalom racer and member of the 2001-2016 U.S. Teams, including the 2016 U.S. Olympic Team; and Darcy Boynton, a writer and teacher. All four children sang on Philadelphia Chickens and BLUE MOO.
