In the production room on the 24th floor of the Time-Life Building in Manhattan, several writers were "greening"--penciling out lines of their stories or adding a few to fit the space allotted to them. Trailing long galleys, the writers and other people on late duty constantly consulted the busy man on the high stool: Director of Computer Composition Robert Boyd. Whenever anything is about to go wrong at the end of the week--a misplaced sentence, a missing picture caption, an inexplicably overlong story--everyone knows that the man to see is Boyd. He can locate the sentence, rewrite the caption --even, it sometimes seems, mysteriously enlarge or shrink a page. As usual, Boyd was working round the clock till he discharged his last duty late on Saturday: sending instructions to the Chicago printers for each of TIME'S eight international editions. It seemed to be a normal TIME closing last week, but it was the end of an era because Bob Boyd was retiring after 38 years at TIME.

Boyd joined TIME'S picture department after working for Newsweek for five years. In addition to his picture duties, he eventually took charge of editorial production and a staff of 175 people. Gruff and authoritarian, he was also fair, compassionate, humorous and fiercely loyal to his staff. According to a coworker, "Even those who didn't like him liked him." Boyd paid ceaseless attention to every detail, worked 100-hour weeks and was never sick. If a cold threatened, his procedure was to stay up all night so that it could not catch him unawares.

Few of his staff were ever sick either --they didn't dare be. Recalls one: "Boyd wouldn't recognize anything short of an amputation." Equally tireless away from work, Boyd over the years has run a program in the Catskills for neighboring kids as well as his own five children and seven grandchildren. He also skis, bicycles and teaches handicraft and square dancing.

During his earlier years at TIME, Boyd oversaw a rather remarkable generation of copy boys, including TV Talk Show Host Dick Cavett, Author George Plimpton and TIME'S present managing editor, Henry Anatole Grunwald. In a risky, highly unusual but apparently astute move, Boyd late one night asked Grunwald to green a story. "Perhaps he was testing me," recalls Grunwald today. TIME was later to test Boyd when he was told to become a computer expert and lead us into what Grunwald describes as the "promised land of interface and input" sans the jargon. We are almost there today, thanks to Boyd, who developed a sophisticated computer-driven editing and typesetting system that processes copy at a 4,200-word-per-minute clip. Actually, Boyd retired once before, but was asked to come back. His second retirement date seems scarcely more credible than the first, but he insists, "This is it."

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