Biography

Velma June Lundy was born on June 16, 1922 in Nebraska City, Nebraska. Her family moved often, living in Anderson, Tabor and Sydney, Iowa before settling in Thurman, Iowa for her high school years. Lundy attended Tabor Junior College in 1939 and received her teaching certificate from Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa in 1940. She signed a contract at the Dutch Hollow School in Fremont County where her mother had started her teaching career thirty years earlier.

In 1941 Lundy worked for six months at the Cherokee State Hospital and then taught at Manti, a rural school near Shenandoah, Iowa. At this time her college boyfriend, Guy Herbert Boyd, was drafted into the U.S. Army and the couple married in 1943. Following the war the Boyds settled in Knoxville, Iowa, where June Boyd returned to college, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1952. She earned a master’s degree in counseling from Drake University in 1964 and for the next twenty years worked as a full-time counselor in the Knoxville school system.

Scope and Content Note

The June Lundy Boyd papers consist of a 67-page memoir entitled “Memoirs of a Middle Child.” The memoir was published by Burr Oak Farm Press, Iowa City, Iowa in a run of twenty copies in 2002.

Boyd’s memoir describes the rhythms of rural life during the 1930s, including farm chores, movie theaters, rodeos and the advent of oleomargarine. She reflects on the loneliness of college life and her perceptions of the Second World War between 1943 and 1944 when her husband was overseas. The memoir concludes with descriptions of her siblings’ grandchildren and the physical maladies she and her husband faced in later years.