Newspaperman Donald M. Murray has died at 82. I shy away from saying “writer” as that’s too generic a term. I feel that writers should be classified as being a poet, or screenwriter, or novelist. Donald Murray was a newspaperman.
I became familiar with Murray from his weekly “Over 60” columns in The Boston Globe. A WW2 combat vet, Murray didn’t appreciate anything florid or fancy in the presentation of an idea. Public relations work wouldn’t have suited him. Murray didn’t accept Tom Brokaw’s label of “The Greatest Generation.” In his 2001 book, My Twice-Lived Life, Murray told some war stories. Here is one of them:
Then a jeep with stretchers lashed to it raced in, and two medics started fighting over the pair of jump boots with the feet still in. I thought it funny but when I got near, one of the bodies on the stretchers spoke. “Hey, Murray. I’m going back to Chicago. I got the lucky wound. You poor bastard, going back to the front.”
He kept taunting me, and I saw his legs had no feet. It was his boots they were fighting over, but he kept taunting me, and when I leaned over I saw it was my friend, high on morphine. He wouldn’t let up, and I felt the hate and envy rise up in me, and I started to move to choke him to death, just holding myself back until I could turn and head back to the front, full of sulfa and rage and fear, and not so much of the enemy but of myself. Are you surprised we are so often silent?
Yes, Murray was a Boston guy, wrote for Boston papers. Retired in New Hampshire. Don’t know if he was ever syndicated.
Man, I feel out of the loop? Why don’t I know this guy? Was he based in Boston?
Murray was not one to retreat from “the indignities of old age.” He spoke of the unspeakable, such as a man leaking after urinating, leaving an obvious “silver dollar sized stain” on his pants. How many kids today have any idea how big a silver dollar is? How long since a silver dollar had any silver in it?
Note: Joe, Eric, and Jane were co-workers of Sam and myself, with Eric being in our group. Joe had been ill for a long time, but the deaths of Eric and Jane (who had left the company a few years ago) were sudden and unexpected.
Mark Evanier has stated repeatedly that he’s getting tired of writing obituaries in newsfromme.com, the blog that was the inspiration and model for my own.
Well. Not a bad place to learn the news, on my brother’s blog. I’ve long admired Mr. Murray, and appreciated his honesty and his refusal to fall in line with others’ opinions or to pretend that anything that’s tough in life is easy. No Pollyanna, but somehow optimistic nonetheless, and brutally candid.
I’ve been depressed since I saw the notice in the paper that he died. I knew it was going to happen at some point because he was 82 and had health issues but the suddenness of it combined with the end of 2006 has really gotten me down. I was already blue thinking about the deaths of Joe Kindorf, Eric Sodersjerna, and Jane Wyman in 2006 along with the recent deaths of Gerald Ford and James Brown and now this one put me over the edge.