John Boston has called the Santa Clarita Valley "home" for most of his life.

Among his many honors, the 60-year-old satirist was presented the Will Rogers Lifetime Humanitarian Achievement Award in Oklahoma City. He has earned 117 major national, regional and state awards for journalism excellence from a variety of organizations, from Scripps Howard to Associated Press. He was named Best Humor Columnist in America by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and, in 2006, the National Newspaper Association gave him the top awards -- separately -- for penning the Best Serious Column and Best Humorous Column. He has won both awards several times before.

Will Fleet, past president of the California Newspaper Association, publisher of the Fresno Bee and a former publisher with The Los Angeles Times, said of Boston: “Of all the writers I have known in my 30 years in the newspaper business, John Boston is the best. By far.”

The L.A. Times, Boston’s competition, devoted the front page-plus of their Sunday Lifestyle section to Boston’s life and work.

Kyra Phillips, news anchor for CNN, said of his work: “All pigs can finally land, the truth will now be everywhere. John Boston is finally going to educate America. His wit, insight and philosophy on life will undoubtedly make you think, laugh, and at times, encourage you to slash his tires. He's simply wonderful.”

Chuck Shepherd of “News of the Weird” once wrote: “I only know one thing, which I pass on to anyone interested: Boston is funnier than David Letterman and twice as funny as Dave Barry.”

From San Francisco's Scott Ostler to George Will, writers and editors have praised Boston's work.

“John Boston skewers pomposity and tells it true. He's a relief from the overly developed id abroad today that is causing us so many troubles. Funny, yet moving, humane, but sassy, Boston turns you toward a path of seeing what's truly important in life. He is a talented voice of sanity,” wrote Anna Karavangelos, Associate Editor for The Washington Post Writers Group.

Boston enjoys horseback riding, fencing (the sword kind, not so much the repair in the cold yucky mud kind), weight lifting, travel, having his paper work all in order, carpentry and, mostly, playing with his daughter. They are currently perfecting a living room impromptu theatre version of “7 Brides for 7 Brothers,” but with dwarfs and pirates. Boston is a former NBC news director, movie star manager, ranch hand, house painter and is the valley historian. He has taught history at the local college for the past 14 years.

Newhall, California boasts of one of the oldest and largest 4th of July parades in America. Since the 1930s, many stars and celebrities have served as Grand Marshall. Boston was named Grand Marshall for the 2008 parade. He rode with the Friends of Hart Park, the Grand Marshall entry, this past July 2010.

He is one of America's most prolific writers.

Since starting as a professional stringer at the age of 14, The California writer has penned more than 5,000 columns and many more stories. He retired from the swashbuckling and eclectic Newhall Signal, formerly run by the famous San Francisco editor Scott Newhall. For years, he published seven columns averaging 1,000 words per, a week for his hometown newspaper, a small daily, The Signal, in Santa Clarita. Boston retains all rights to his thousands of columns and plans to re-issue many in a series of collected works.

He is author of the novel, “Naked Came the Sasquatch” which currently has a 5-star rating on Amazon.com.

“Sasquatch” was required reading at Harvard. The freshman English lit instructor, Dr. Rhonda Rockwell, likened Boston’s work to: “an amalgamation of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, without being any or all of them and maybe a little bit better. Blessedly, no one writes like him.” Boston owns all rights to “Sasquatch” and plans to complete the sequel and ‘three-quel’ of the series.

He has finished the final draft on “Adam Henry,” a literary adventure in which a hero has a choice of pushing a button drawn on a cocktail napkin that will get rid of every acrimonious soul on Earth.

Boston is currently finishing the last edit of “The Halcyon Times & Rural Avenger,” a four-generational epic about how an unlikely alliance of a retired serial killer, practical joking journalists and eco-terrorists take on a billionaire developer who has bought a Yosemite-like national park and is planning to turn it into the world's largest yuppie concentration camp planned suburban community.

His novel he has just started is “Writing Poorly,” about a support group of unpublished and truly bad writers in the desert being killed off one-by-one by a New York editor who is a patient at one of the region’s many rehab and detox centers.

He is also a published children’s book author (“The Book of Yes”/Avon). On a back burner are plans to publish a series of children’s books.

Boston is the historian of the Santa Clarita Valley and author of  Arcadia Publishing's {>}The History of the Santa Clarita Valley. It debuted, with great acclaim, at the 2009 Buckaroo Book Shop, part of the annual Santa Clarita Cowboy Festival.