Bringing Apollo Home: Clay Boyce Biography, The Journey From Mountaineer to Rocketeer

Like a lot of people, Clay Boyce led an interesting life. The difference is, he’s a natural story-teller. His contagious curiosity and love for the possibility of adventure, hold his audience spell-bound. Come along on this roller coaster ride of a poor mountain boy born into a shack with no electricity. Clay Boyce definitely had humble beginnings, but his curiosity pushed him into one adventure after another.

His desire to experience everything possible cost money, so he started working at eleven to buy model airplane parts, engine parts, boat parts. Always curious about how things functioned, he was thrilled when his father would give him an engine and tell him to take it apart. At fourteen he learned to operate heavy equipment. Clay paid for flying lessons by working at JCPenney and flew solo at seventeen. By the time he turned eighteen, he’d built his first jet engine which he took to his high school, bolted to the science lab workbench, and fired it up. It produced such a tremendous noise, the principle evacuated the school, thinking they were under attack.

While writing his story I constantly vacillated between outright laughter and cringing. All I could think was how glad I was that I wasn’t his parent. What a handful!

Clay decided to get his mechanical engineering degree and joined the Air Force ROTC. When he graduated, he was assigned on the 1st Pilotless Bomber Squadron and shipped off to Germany during the Cold War. His job? To guide the Matador carrying a warhead three times the power of Hiroshima… if needed. Crazy, right?

Back in the United States, he decided to give this engineering career a go. Clay naturally gravitated to Aerojet, a rocket company. In June 1960, Clay got a three a.m. phone call from Aerojet telling him to go to Philadelphia and find out what this thing called Apollo was all about. Not only did he find out, he became the Chief Engineer over the SPS engine attached to the command module.

Clay’s life has really never slowed down. At ninety-two, he’s traveled to almost every country on Earth and still has places he wants to go.

This is a true-story to inspire all of us to not let our humble beginnings define us.