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Mourning Family Finds Solace In Man's Gift Of Life

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By CHERYL BENTLEY, The Suncoast News

Published: February 18, 2008

NEW PORT RICHEY - Lucky is, indeed, lucky. A former stray, the kitten named Lucky now has a home.

Lucky's guardian, Joyce Boloyan, tells the story of how her son, Myron John Boloyan, found Lucky in September. He gave the cat to Joyce to keep in her Port Richey home, just as he had rescued strays when he was a child.

Joyce Boloyan cuddles Lucky, holding on to her one last moment, as if reluctant to let go of the kitten, who provides a link to her son.

Myron, a New Port Richey resident, has been dead almost two months, killed in a car crash on Little Road in December. Myron was thrown from his car during the crash.

His close-knit family now almost can get through a conversation about Myron without someone crying.

Almost, but not quite. His widow, Sherri, chokes up when describing how Feb. 5 would have been her husband's 40th birthday.

Joyce Boloyan becomes tearful when describing all the ways her son loved life.

He crammed it full of family, cars and art. And in his last act, he gave life to others.

Two people received Boloyan's organs, according to a letter to Sherri Boloyan from LifeLink Foundation, the nonprofit organ and tissue recovery organization in Tampa.

A 54-year-old Florida man received Boloyan's liver and left kidney. A 47-year-old man from Illinois got the right kidney.

His family clings to the thought of the life Boloyan gave to two others.

The gift of his organs mirrors one that was made to him about eight years ago, when he was the recipient of a cornea and retina transplant. The transplant didn't take, leaving him blind in one eye.

But Boloyan always remembered the donor and said he would want to do the same.

That was the kind of person he was. He always thought of others.

"He'd do anything in the world to help someone if he could," Joyce Boloyan recalled.

In response to his warm heart, 350 people showed up at his funeral.
Myron also was a talented artist.

He loved to draw and paint in school but found his artistic outlet working with metal. He tamed it, bending it into the shapes of the fish in the waters of his beloved Gulf of Mexico. His metal creatures looked as if they were ready to sail through life on languid waters.

But their creator preferred getting through it on wheels.

Cars were his passion and his job. He worked at C & C Body Shop in Port Richey, where he did body work and sheet metal fabrication.

When he graduated from high school in Waterford, Mich., the only graduation present he wanted was his parents' 1966 Mustang.

Restoring the classic pony car took him five years, but the work was worth it. He transformed it into a sleek, yellow convertible that earned a two-page color spread and cover inset in Super Ford magazine.

He was in one of his beloved cars the day he died. For about a year, he had worked with his dad, Myron George Boloyan, on a 1930 Model A Ford Speedster, building the automobile from scratch using old Ford parts.

The car was totaled in the wreck, but the garage where it was built is busy once again. Myron George and Carl Boloyan, Myron John's brother, are working on the go-cart the younger Myron was building for his only child, 9-year-old Alicia, when he died.

Something of Myron will live on in that cart, but that doesn't stop wife Sherri from missing him terribly.

"There's not another Myron in this world," she said.

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