Last Man on Earth

"How strong are your instincts for survival?" the San Francisco Chronicle asked its readers three weeks ago. "Could you, an average city dweller, exist in the wilderness tomorrow with little more than your bare hands?" Having raised this nuclear-age question, the Chronicle announced that it was dubbing Outdoors Writer Harvey R. Boyd "The Last Man on Earth" and setting his entire family to a six-week survival test.

"Bud" Boyd, a paunchy 41, his wife Betty, and their children, Susan, 15, Sharon, 12, and Bruce, 8, packed into the wilds of Lower Lipstick Lake, 250 miles north of San Francisco and less than four miles from the ranch house of Boyd's friend J. D. Proctor. With them they carried salt, an ax, five knives, 50 ft. of nylon rope, toothbrushes, a ball of twine and--for emergencies--a sealed rifle, a flashlight and a first-aid kit.

"We Need Food." By prearrangement, Proctor picked up the first batch of Boyd copy for distribution to the 40-odd papers that had bitten on the Chronicle bait.

"Our lean-to is another miserable failure," noted Boyd on the second day. "We need some kind of food," he wrote on the third, telling how he fashioned Sharon's ring into a barbless hook and caught seven trout. Breathlessly, Boyd reported the discovery of a set of deer horns, a hunter's cache of cooking gear, a squirrel's cache of nuts--and described a family feast of frogs' legs provided by his son.

Such Swiss Family Robinson stuff had its curiosity value to all but the other morning paper in San Francisco, Hearst's Examiner, which, while still leading the Chronicle in circulation, 276,692 to 270,285, views with sour face the Chronicle's aggressive efforts to catch up. At length, the Examiner could stand no more. Up to the Boyd survival site it sent newsmen for a look around.

What they found made a banner headline in the Examiner last week: BOYD'S CAMPING JAUNT EXPOSED. Below, the Examiner reported that the Boyds had disappeared, jubilantly printed a description of their primitive campsite: "Kitchen matches. Shells from fresh eggs. Empty cans which once contained spaghetti. Watermelon rinds. July issue of the Reader's Digest. So much toilet tissue that some of it had been used to start a fire." The Examiner cautiously refrained from drawing any snide conclusions. But the evening News-Call Bulletin, jointly owned by Hearst and Scripps-Howard, was less kind: "The Examiner published voluminous type and pictures to imply that Boyd was no hero but possibly--just possibly--a hoaxer."

"Finest Goddam Articles." Finally, Chronicle Executive Editor Scott Newhall produced the truth. According to Newhall, it was not fraud--just tender-footedness. After watching his wife and daughters weaken from malnutrition and dysentery, Bud Boyd had marched out, returned with mounts, Rancher Proctor, the spaghetti, and other restoratives. Then the tenderfeet, after twelve days of roughing it, beelined for the sybaritic comforts of their Mill Valley, Calif, home.

But if the wilderness saga was not a fraud, it was the next thing to it. The Boyds were back home resting before the first installment of their outing reached print--a fact that prompted only a few client newspapers, among them the New York Herald Tribune and the Boston Herald and Traveler, to drop the series.

Nor was the Chronicle's Newhall at all discomposed by the Last Man's inglorious retreat. Said he: "Those are the finest goddam articles this paper has ever run. This is what makes the whole folklore of journalism worthwhile." So saying, he slapped a $1,500,000 libel suit on the competition. The Examiner, charged the Chronicle's suit, had defamed the Chronicle's "reputation for truthful, honest and accurate reporting."

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