Services set for Eva-Marie Warren Boyd

Barbara Diamond

A memorial gathering will be held at 9 a.m., Saturday, at Oak Street

Park for Eva-Marie Warren Boyd, who died Feb. 10 after having been in

a coma for days. She was 63.

Her family described her as a renaissance woman: a teacher, a

businesswoman, a knitwear designer and knitter, a docent with the

Laguna Art Museum, a volunteer with Laguna Beach Animal Shelter when

she first moved to town, a Little League scorekeeper, an attorney, a

mother and a wife.

“She loved to dance and she was an incredible athlete,” son James

Warren Boyd said. “She didn’t know she was only 4 feet, 11 inches.”

People would smile seeing her out walking with her big dogs,

trotting docilely at the side of their diminutive owner.

Eva-Marie Lisalotte Halberstrob was born Nov. 7, 1941 in Breslau, Germany, now a part of Poland.

She survived World War II by hiding in the Austrian Hills with her

mother. Her uncle and her father just disappeared, never to be heard

from again, and her grandparents were sent to a “relocation center.”

Eva-Marie immigrated to the United States after the war when Helen

Schultz Halberstrob married American James Warren. She took her

step-father’s name.

“We met in the fifth grade at St. Ignatius Academy in Fort Worth,”

husband Clarence Hagood “C” Boyd III said. “We were married in 1960.”

The Boyds had two sons, Clarence H. “Chuck” Boyd IV and James

Boyd.

“After our two sons were born, she went back to school at Texas

Christian University and graduated magna cum laude with a double

major in German and history,” C Boyd said. “She was a really smart

lady.”

The family moved to California in 1968, settling into an Eichler

home in Orange. She taught school while her husband was getting his

manufacturer’s representative business started, then worked for him.

After their sons went off to college, the Boyds moved to Laguna

Beach in 1985 and opened the Elan Art Gallery. When the Boyds sold

the gallery, Eva-Marie went back to school to earn a juris doctorate

at Western State Law School, where she made Law Review.

She practiced law in Laguna after passing the bar examination on

her first try.

“She went to San Diego to take the bar and she was upset and

thought she would never make it,” said son James Boyd, a lecturer in

English at Cal State San Francisco. “As a kid, my favorite book to

have her read to me was ‘The Little Engine That Could.’ So I mailed

her a copy.”

She served as law school alumni president, Orange County

Barristers president and on the board of the Orange County Bar Assn.

The Public Law Center presented her with the Advocate Award in

1993 for her pro bono work with “Justice for All.”

“Her death was unexpected,” C Boyd said.

Eva-Marie never awakened after lapsing into a coma during the

night at her home.

“We had had a fun day and she went to bed early,” Boyd said. “I

slept on the couch. When I went upstairs in the morning, I couldn’t

wake her up.”

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Red

Cross.