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Saturday, April 26, 2008

Freelance Writer Also Had a Funny Side

By Lloyd Jojola
Journal Staff Writer
    Daniel Murphy always enjoyed writing, though it wasn't something he truly pursued until he left a nearly 30-year career in the Air Force.
    As a freelance writer, he produced personality profiles that appeared in the monthly paper Prime Time.
    And there was the funny side of Murphy, who in the 1970s wrote for Lower Lip, a city comedy troupe seen in skits a la Second City or "Saturday Night Live."
    "He was tremendously funny," said Bruce McClure, a longtime friend and Lower Lip collaborator. "He wasn't a jokester as much as he was a raconteur."
    McClure put it this way, the same way Kasper Gutman put it to Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon": "I'll tell you right out, I am a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk."
    "And that was Dan," McClure said. "He did. He liked to talk to people who liked to talk, and he liked to talk.
    "So it was very much an aspect of who he was."
    Albuquerque resident Daniel J. Murphy died March 21 after the neurological disease myasthenia gravis was diagnosed. He was 83. He died less than two months after he watched his wife, Patricia, die after battling Alzheimer's disease.
    Theirs were dissimilar personalities, but they complemented each other, said Colin Murphy, their only child.
    "My dad was really outgoing, made friends with anybody, and would have the waitress talking about her life in five minutes," he said. "My mom was sort of more innerly focused.
    "My dad sort of brought her out of her shell a little bit and made her more open, and then she kind of tempered him."
    Murphy loved to listen to jazz piano, while her tastes leaned toward choral music. But there were enjoyments to share, like Lobos women's basketball and traveling.
    Murphy was Brooklyn-born.
    He joined the military during World War II and left for a brief time before rejoining.
    He had worked as a copy boy for the New York Herald Tribune between the military stints and was next in line to become a reporter.
    "So the story goes," his son said, "one day there was this new guy walking around the office, and my dad was like, 'Who's that guy?' They said, 'Oh, that's the new reporter'— kind of taking the job that he thought he was going to get."
    Fuming, Murphy passed a recruiting office and joined.
    "He got back to the office later and was like, 'You know, I signed up for the Air Force; forget this.' And they were like, 'Oh, that's the new classified editor.' ''
    But the choice was a good fit, and Murphy spent 28 years as an Air Force medic and hospital supervisor.
    "He really found a lifestyle that he enjoyed, and it was a way for a working-class kid from Brooklyn to see the world," his son said.
    While in England in the late 1960s, Murphy met his wife, Patricia, a native of Dublin, Ireland, who was adopted and grew up in Scotland and England.
    Cambridge-educated, she was a nurse and midwife for about a decade in England and served as a missionary nurse in Jordan.
    They wed in 1970, and the family moved to Albuquerque, the site of Murphy's last posting at Kirtland Air Force Base.
    Patricia Murphy worked for many years in a crisis unit at the University of New Mexico Mental Health Center, her son said. Daniel Murphy, after retiring from the military in 1975, studied at the University of Albuquerque and then UNM, where he completed a degree focusing on creative writing.
    "The military in a way was an interruption in what he initially wanted to do," McClure said.
    Aside from Prime Time, Murphy freelanced for other newspapers and magazines, and he produced plays, scripts and poetry over the years.
    "I would say his forte ended up being the interview," McClure said about his friend's freelance work. "He had a bit of a style with interviewing people."
    Patricia Grace Murphy retired in 2000, when she began getting symptoms of Alzheimer's.
    "It started out where she basically lost her ability to do simple math calculations and making change," Colin Murphy said. "And then it gradually progressed."
    Daniel Murphy began taking care of his wife about 2004, when she increasingly needed help doing day-to-day activities.
    "He was the most patient person I have ever seen ... and he would not leave her," said Mary Lou Langford, a family friend. "He would stop going to the (sports) games and he would stop doing stuff, because he didn't want her to be left with somebody else."
    In the nearly three decades the Langfords knew the Murphys, Mary Lou Langford said, she never saw Daniel Murphy upset with his wife.
    "I asked him about that," she said. "And he said, 'Well, she never did anything for me to be angry about.' ''
    A few days before 67-year-old Patricia Murphy entered the hospital, about three weeks before she died, Daniel Murphy developed an eye problem— a sign of the autoimmune neuromuscular disease he would be striken with.
    Daniel Murphy quickly went from having double vision to not being able to draw a breath on his own, his son said.
    Murphy had been on a respirator for weeks and, having been in the medical field, he knew it was a long road to recovery, his son said.
    "I think he decided he didn't want to spend his last couple of years in hospitals and in rehab facilities, ... so he asked to be taken off the respirator," Colin Murphy said. "He was like, 'I don't need to fight this anymore.' ''
    Murphy's survivors include his son, Colin, and daughter-in-law Elizabeth Cotton-Murphy, of Chicago.