Boucher’s life is much more richly documented than those of any other Forteans thus far considered.  His papers—some of which I have seen—are at Indiana University’s Lilly Library; he has warranted interviews, articles, even a biobibliography by Jeffrey Marks.  (For those thinking of purchasing it—don’t.  The book has some good information, which I mine for this series, but it is poorly written, repetitive, and badly edited.  Only for the confirmed Boucher-fan or needy historian.)

Boucher was born in Oakland, California, on 21 August 1911 and given the name William Parker White.   (Parker was his mother’s maiden name.)  His father, James Taylor White, died (of typhoid, according to Marks’s book) before Boucher was one year old.  He was forty-six.

James had been a doctor, as was Boucher’s mother, Mary Parker White.  In the years after his James’s death, Boucher was raised by his mother, who continued to practice her profession, as well as her parents, William—Boucher’s namesake, who had accepted free passage to the US from Scotland in return for joining the Union Army during the Civil War.  He left behind his wife and son, eventually remarrying Annie Boucher Hine, and Irish Catholic woman, whom, whom he apparently met after the War, when he had relocated to California.  Boucher’s grandfather seems something of a restless man, having later divorced Annie, remarried and divorced again only to remarry Annie once more.   Annie died in 1913; William in 1930.

The young William Parker White grew up as a Catholic, apparently inherited from his grandmother and mother—his father had been Episcopalian.  Anthony was his confirmation name.   He was sickly as a child, afflicted with asthma.  He also spent some time in a sanitarium during the early 1920s.  The illness disrupted his education, but he eventually ended up attending a military school in San Rafael, California, north of the family home in Berkeley, and Pasadena High School.  He went to Junior College in Pasadena and then to the University of Southern California.   He received an MA from the University of California Berkeley in 1934.  Boucher met his future wife, Phyllis Mary Price, at Berkeley.  She was the daughter of a Professor of German (and his major was German).

Despite his interrupted education, Boucher was intelligent and loved reading, teaching himself to speed-read at age 14.  He came to know eight foreign languages: German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Greek, Sanskrit, and Italian.  Apparently—although Marks’s makes little of this—not only was Boucher interested in languages, reading, and writing from a young age, but he—like the other Bay Area Forteans—was bitten by the Weird Tales bug—or touched by Cthullu’s tentacle, or had his fate inscribed in the dread tome, Necronomicon—because his first published work was a ghost story vignette, “Ye Good Old Ghost Storie,” published in the January 1927 issue.

In college, Boucher became infatuated with the theater, which shaped much of his later career.  After receiving his MA, he moved to Los Angeles—again, after having done school there earlier—and sought work in Hollywood.  Boucher was never really successful there, although he wrote a number of plays and theater reviews for United Progressive News.  He did get a poem published in Weird Tales and in the late 1930s published his first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry.  This was under the name of Anthony Boucher, presumably because his given name William White was too pedestrian, combining his confirmation name with his maternal grandmother’s maiden name.  One benefit of that name was its French meaning—“butcher,” an evocation the mild-mannered and generous Boucher liked for his stories.