We always knew him as Murph. In his later years, he went by Kenneth. I seem to recall getting together with him in Washington DC one summer when I was there on business. I had dinner with him. He was driving a Chrysler convertible and he wore a bow tie. He had a bumper sticker that read, "I stop for red lights!" it s funny the things that you remember. He was a true bohemian. He did not fit the mould. He was extremely creative and an amazing guitarist.
When he was in Viet Nam, we (Elliot Singer) and I used to visit his mom from time to time. She was a wonderful person and she used to wear a peace sign button on her coat. I think I gave it to her, actually. She died of cancer but I'm not sure when.
I remember when he went to New York and then I moved to Seattle and we lost track of one another. Than years later, after I moved to Vancouver Canada, I discovered that he was living in Portland, Oregon and we met in Seattle for lunch. I still have photos of that time we had together. I'm not sure if that was before or after our 20th reunion but it was there that we re-connected so it must have been after that.
Murph and Dave Martin were good friends. Dave went to the Catholic high school and he was also an accomplished folk guitar player. I remember one time that we (Murph, Dave Martin, Elliot Singer and I) drove down to W. Virginia to hear the Children of Stone, a band doing Rolling Stone covers. They were kids from Dormont, playing at a bar. The bass player, Ron Eremita, ended up playing with Rebecca and the Sunnybrook Farmers, the band that I played with and we played at Woodstock in 1968. That's my musical claim to fame. Ilene Rappaport (graduated Mt. Lebanon in 67) was one of the leaders and song writers. She went on to be a musician and song writer and she now lives in LA and has changed her name to Lauren Wood. You can Google her.
I've asked Dave Martin if he can provide an obituary for Murph and if he agrees, I'll send it to you. Dave lives in Boston and he and I are friends on FB. We finally found something we can agree on: We both can't stand Donald Trump. He is a liberal and believe it or not, I've turned into a conservative. Crazy, eh?
Well, I think that is all I have for you. I must say that I was shocked at how many of us have passed away. I remember speaking with Norman Shore during the last reunion. How sad. Perhaps that is a good reason to make an effort to get my butt to Pgh on Sept.
I remember Kenny more from grade school at Washington Elementary and Jr. High at Mellon. He lived at that time in an apartment on Florida Avenue with his mom. I lived several blocks away on Mabrick. Both of us loved Mad Magazine. He'd sneak them into class once in a while and we'd sit in the back of the room and try to keep from cracking up (usually unsuccessfully). Kenny had an extensive collection of issues of Mad, so we were rarely without entertainment and often separated by angry teachers. We kind of went our separate ways in High School and I had no idea what happened to him after graduation. It sounds like he had a full, if short, life. RIP, KC.
I, too, remember Kenny more from grade school......and he was a sweet, very funny kid....& the last part usually got him in trouble with teachers...but it never shut him down. So sad that's no longer with us. I am also saddened (and surprised) at how many are no longer with us.....makes me feel even more fortunate to still be here.
This tribute is being submitted by a dear friend, David Martin, who graduated from South Catholic, but wanted to go on record:
Kenneth Murphy
In Memoriam
I met Kenneth Murphy in the summer of 1965, at a pool party in Joan Higgins’s backyard. I didn’t know anyone there. Todd Hanau and I arrived just as the party was winding down and Joanie’s mom was suggesting that Kenny should wear a hairnet in her pool. A few of the kids laughed and ribbed him, perhaps self-consciously, because that summer long hair was a badge of honor, rebellious and risky, and nobody’s hair was longer than Murph's.
Our first real conversation was on a hot, sticky summer night hanging out with a group of friends on a bank of grass above the Circle in Mt. Lebanon Park. It was as if we realized that we were sparks of the same fire. We talked about books, art, life, death, and music. Especially music, and later that night we walked to the apartment Murph shared with his mother to get his nylon string guitar and bring it back to the park where, into the wee hours, we played each other the songs we knew. Our friendship took hold that summer, and continued unbroken, despite gaps of distance and communication, until his death some forty-three years later.
There are a few things I’d like to say to Kenneth. Some of these things I may never have said to him while he was here. Still, I’d like to express my appreciation of him and the qualities of his that drew me to him and made our friendship indelible.
During that first conversation of ours, you asked me what I would do if I knew I were about to die. Raised in a devout Catholic family, I said I would probably go to confession, and you asked me, “Why?” The Baltimore Catechism, the official reference for all such questions, would have answered: to avoid eternal damnation.
Your mother, who as a single mom raised you in the small apartment on Florida Avenue, took you to a different church every Sunday. This way you could hear what each had to say and form your own opinions. She also took you to museums, concerts and other cultural events whenever she could. Your points of reference were more varied and open-ended than mine. There was always more than just one possibility. You questioned assumptions, but you were willing to listen to the other person’s point of view. Beginning with that first question, you lifted the lid on my childhood Catholicism, giving it some welcome breathing space. You provided a new opening, a new stimulus to my thoughts.
Once you formed an opinion about something, you could hold it very strongly. But you were still able to see how someone else might arrive at a different conclusion, or could have a preference that varied from yours. Even though you might dismiss so-and-so as a real jerk, you had the underlying attitude that, yes, people sometimes will be jerks, and, at least to some extent, that is their own choice. You respected that, and your sense of fair-mindedness continues to instruct me at those times when I need to remind myself to be tolerant of others.
It was fun to be with you, because of your easy sense of humor and your enthusiasm for so many things. One of our mutual delights was wordplay, twisting language to our own ends, whether nonsensical or pointed:
“How do you make rivel soup?”
“You go down to the rivel and fill a pot with water and boil it.”
Or, much later, remarking on a video of Eric Clapton’s apparent disapproval of a David Sanborn solo,
“He was a chastened Sanborn.”
You were always able to negotiate the practical realities of life, but even as a teenager you had the ability to use your creative imagination to take you where you wanted to go. You once told me that life was like acting: you choose what you want to be and then you become it. You tried out various personas based on prototypes or artists you admired: Elvis, John Lennon, Dylan, Lytton Strachey, The English Gentleman, The Bluesman. When we were kids this would sometimes annoy me, maybe because you were so good at it and it seemed to provide you with a layer of insulation from the world that I felt I could have used.
Your creative imagination would often spark mine, and then a chain reaction would begin. We would spin stories of who and where we would be, a year, a decade or several from the present. We would project scenarios for our lives, for films or plays we’d like to see, books we’d like to read, people we’d like to meet. At times this could get very specific. Sitting in my basement room, we once brainstormed a detailed storyboard for video to accompany each song on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, long before there were music videos.
You had the engineer’s passion for understanding and appreciating not only how something worked but also how it could be improved. You approached new learning experiences with the fearlessness of the dilettante, in the original sense of the word: someone who likes to have a go at things.
You read avidly, you wrote daily in your notebooks. You researched, you analyzed. You took cooking classes with Marcella Hazan and experimented in the kitchen, seeking through trial and error to make the best soft-cooked egg, the perfect loaf of bread, the ultimate beef daube. You studied painting, especially the Abstract Expressionists, and created works on canvas that you happily admitted were influenced by the work of Franz Kline. You absorbed Muddy Waters’ music and taught yourself to play slide guitar with solid technique and raw emotion. You performed at local blues bars in Portland and formed a band of younger musicians, some who had never played in public before, and encouraged them to perform regularly. You designed your living spaces with a sense of both Feng Shui and Mid-Century Modern style. You appreciated all that went into making objects, or songs, or dishes, that were beautiful and well made.
You loved women and you were a true romantic who could fall in love easily. In more than one relationship, you felt that you had found the love of your life. Your heart was always open to love.
You loved dogs and cats. You once rescued a black Labrador Retriever that you found on the highway. When you first brought him home you placed ads in the local papers seeking the owner, while secretly hoping that the apparently abandoned and possibly abused dog would not be claimed. When a reasonable amount of time had passed and no one had claimed him, you breathed a sigh of relief and made him your own, naming him Fergus, from the Yeats poem we both loved.
You had the Irish gift of lightness, of making fun of situations and people, including me, including yourself, in a light, offhanded way that was funny without being malicious. Even on one of your last days, when I came to visit you, after helping you out of your sickbed, you took one glance at what I was wearing and said, matter-of-factly, “Dorky socks.”
After a long hiatus of raising families and pursing careers, we reconnected in Portland, Oregon. I was between jobs and you were living there, semi-retired as a telecom executive. You had traveled the world, avoiding the usual places and going where the locals would go, and you had lots of good stories.
With your encouragement I eventually moved to Portland, and in the last few years of your life, we played music together in dive bars, coffee shops, barbecue joints, clubs, parks, private parties, beer gardens — wherever we could get a gig. Our set lists included blues and the old songs we had spent a lifetime learning. We had worked out some of the arrangements of these songs forty years earlier at Petty’s music store in downtown Pittsburgh where, as teenagers, we would often spend part of our Saturdays. We were doing what we loved, picking up the thread we had found that hot summer night so many years ago in Mt. Lebanon Park.
Last but not least, I remember your courage. I could give many examples of this. You once explained to me that during your first experience of being under fire in Vietnam, you said to yourself that if you could get through this you could get through anything. But even long before that, as a scruffy kid with long hair, you would stand up to crew-cutted, musclebound bullies rather than allow them the satisfaction of thinking they could intimidate you. We would sometimes get into fights with such types, usually getting the worst of it. When you were discharged from the army and we started our band in Squirrel Hill, our first gig was playing to a packed house at Skibo Hall, the old Carnegie Mellon student union. You stood up on the stage with your guitar and sang every single verse of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” That was gutsy.
Susan Devlin
We always knew him as Murph. In his later years, he went by Kenneth. I seem to recall getting together with him in Washington DC one summer when I was there on business. I had dinner with him. He was driving a Chrysler convertible and he wore a bow tie. He had a bumper sticker that read, "I stop for red lights!" it s funny the things that you remember. He was a true bohemian. He did not fit the mould. He was extremely creative and an amazing guitarist.
When he was in Viet Nam, we (Elliot Singer) and I used to visit his mom from time to time. She was a wonderful person and she used to wear a peace sign button on her coat. I think I gave it to her, actually. She died of cancer but I'm not sure when.
I remember when he went to New York and then I moved to Seattle and we lost track of one another. Than years later, after I moved to Vancouver Canada, I discovered that he was living in Portland, Oregon and we met in Seattle for lunch. I still have photos of that time we had together. I'm not sure if that was before or after our 20th reunion but it was there that we re-connected so it must have been after that.
Murph and Dave Martin were good friends. Dave went to the Catholic high school and he was also an accomplished folk guitar player. I remember one time that we (Murph, Dave Martin, Elliot Singer and I) drove down to W. Virginia to hear the Children of Stone, a band doing Rolling Stone covers. They were kids from Dormont, playing at a bar. The bass player, Ron Eremita, ended up playing with Rebecca and the Sunnybrook Farmers, the band that I played with and we played at Woodstock in 1968. That's my musical claim to fame. Ilene Rappaport (graduated Mt. Lebanon in 67) was one of the leaders and song writers. She went on to be a musician and song writer and she now lives in LA and has changed her name to Lauren Wood. You can Google her.
I've asked Dave Martin if he can provide an obituary for Murph and if he agrees, I'll send it to you. Dave lives in Boston and he and I are friends on FB. We finally found something we can agree on: We both can't stand Donald Trump. He is a liberal and believe it or not, I've turned into a conservative. Crazy, eh?
Well, I think that is all I have for you. I must say that I was shocked at how many of us have passed away. I remember speaking with Norman Shore during the last reunion. How sad. Perhaps that is a good reason to make an effort to get my butt to Pgh on Sept.
Blessings!
Cliff Mandell
Richard L. Montgomery
I remember Kenny more from grade school at Washington Elementary and Jr. High at Mellon. He lived at that time in an apartment on Florida Avenue with his mom. I lived several blocks away on Mabrick. Both of us loved Mad Magazine. He'd sneak them into class once in a while and we'd sit in the back of the room and try to keep from cracking up (usually unsuccessfully). Kenny had an extensive collection of issues of Mad, so we were rarely without entertainment and often separated by angry teachers. We kind of went our separate ways in High School and I had no idea what happened to him after graduation. It sounds like he had a full, if short, life. RIP, KC.
Lyn K. Morander (George)
I, too, remember Kenny more from grade school......and he was a sweet, very funny kid....& the last part usually got him in trouble with teachers...but it never shut him down. So sad that's no longer with us. I am also saddened (and surprised) at how many are no longer with us.....makes me feel even more fortunate to still be here.
Susan Devlin
This tribute is being submitted by a dear friend, David Martin, who graduated from South Catholic, but wanted to go on record:
Kenneth Murphy
In Memoriam
I met Kenneth Murphy in the summer of 1965, at a pool party in Joan Higgins’s backyard. I didn’t know anyone there. Todd Hanau and I arrived just as the party was winding down and Joanie’s mom was suggesting that Kenny should wear a hairnet in her pool. A few of the kids laughed and ribbed him, perhaps self-consciously, because that summer long hair was a badge of honor, rebellious and risky, and nobody’s hair was longer than Murph's.
Our first real conversation was on a hot, sticky summer night hanging out with a group of friends on a bank of grass above the Circle in Mt. Lebanon Park. It was as if we realized that we were sparks of the same fire. We talked about books, art, life, death, and music. Especially music, and later that night we walked to the apartment Murph shared with his mother to get his nylon string guitar and bring it back to the park where, into the wee hours, we played each other the songs we knew. Our friendship took hold that summer, and continued unbroken, despite gaps of distance and communication, until his death some forty-three years later.
There are a few things I’d like to say to Kenneth. Some of these things I may never have said to him while he was here. Still, I’d like to express my appreciation of him and the qualities of his that drew me to him and made our friendship indelible.
During that first conversation of ours, you asked me what I would do if I knew I were about to die. Raised in a devout Catholic family, I said I would probably go to confession, and you asked me, “Why?” The Baltimore Catechism, the official reference for all such questions, would have answered: to avoid eternal damnation.
Your mother, who as a single mom raised you in the small apartment on Florida Avenue, took you to a different church every Sunday. This way you could hear what each had to say and form your own opinions. She also took you to museums, concerts and other cultural events whenever she could. Your points of reference were more varied and open-ended than mine. There was always more than just one possibility. You questioned assumptions, but you were willing to listen to the other person’s point of view. Beginning with that first question, you lifted the lid on my childhood Catholicism, giving it some welcome breathing space. You provided a new opening, a new stimulus to my thoughts.
Once you formed an opinion about something, you could hold it very strongly. But you were still able to see how someone else might arrive at a different conclusion, or could have a preference that varied from yours. Even though you might dismiss so-and-so as a real jerk, you had the underlying attitude that, yes, people sometimes will be jerks, and, at least to some extent, that is their own choice. You respected that, and your sense of fair-mindedness continues to instruct me at those times when I need to remind myself to be tolerant of others.
It was fun to be with you, because of your easy sense of humor and your enthusiasm for so many things. One of our mutual delights was wordplay, twisting language to our own ends, whether nonsensical or pointed:
“How do you make rivel soup?”
“You go down to the rivel and fill a pot with water and boil it.”
Or, much later, remarking on a video of Eric Clapton’s apparent disapproval of a David Sanborn solo,
“He was a chastened Sanborn.”
You were always able to negotiate the practical realities of life, but even as a teenager you had the ability to use your creative imagination to take you where you wanted to go. You once told me that life was like acting: you choose what you want to be and then you become it. You tried out various personas based on prototypes or artists you admired: Elvis, John Lennon, Dylan, Lytton Strachey, The English Gentleman, The Bluesman. When we were kids this would sometimes annoy me, maybe because you were so good at it and it seemed to provide you with a layer of insulation from the world that I felt I could have used.
Your creative imagination would often spark mine, and then a chain reaction would begin. We would spin stories of who and where we would be, a year, a decade or several from the present. We would project scenarios for our lives, for films or plays we’d like to see, books we’d like to read, people we’d like to meet. At times this could get very specific. Sitting in my basement room, we once brainstormed a detailed storyboard for video to accompany each song on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, long before there were music videos.
You had the engineer’s passion for understanding and appreciating not only how something worked but also how it could be improved. You approached new learning experiences with the fearlessness of the dilettante, in the original sense of the word: someone who likes to have a go at things.
You read avidly, you wrote daily in your notebooks. You researched, you analyzed. You took cooking classes with Marcella Hazan and experimented in the kitchen, seeking through trial and error to make the best soft-cooked egg, the perfect loaf of bread, the ultimate beef daube. You studied painting, especially the Abstract Expressionists, and created works on canvas that you happily admitted were influenced by the work of Franz Kline. You absorbed Muddy Waters’ music and taught yourself to play slide guitar with solid technique and raw emotion. You performed at local blues bars in Portland and formed a band of younger musicians, some who had never played in public before, and encouraged them to perform regularly. You designed your living spaces with a sense of both Feng Shui and Mid-Century Modern style. You appreciated all that went into making objects, or songs, or dishes, that were beautiful and well made.
You loved women and you were a true romantic who could fall in love easily. In more than one relationship, you felt that you had found the love of your life. Your heart was always open to love.
You loved dogs and cats. You once rescued a black Labrador Retriever that you found on the highway. When you first brought him home you placed ads in the local papers seeking the owner, while secretly hoping that the apparently abandoned and possibly abused dog would not be claimed. When a reasonable amount of time had passed and no one had claimed him, you breathed a sigh of relief and made him your own, naming him Fergus, from the Yeats poem we both loved.
You had the Irish gift of lightness, of making fun of situations and people, including me, including yourself, in a light, offhanded way that was funny without being malicious. Even on one of your last days, when I came to visit you, after helping you out of your sickbed, you took one glance at what I was wearing and said, matter-of-factly, “Dorky socks.”
After a long hiatus of raising families and pursing careers, we reconnected in Portland, Oregon. I was between jobs and you were living there, semi-retired as a telecom executive. You had traveled the world, avoiding the usual places and going where the locals would go, and you had lots of good stories.
With your encouragement I eventually moved to Portland, and in the last few years of your life, we played music together in dive bars, coffee shops, barbecue joints, clubs, parks, private parties, beer gardens — wherever we could get a gig. Our set lists included blues and the old songs we had spent a lifetime learning. We had worked out some of the arrangements of these songs forty years earlier at Petty’s music store in downtown Pittsburgh where, as teenagers, we would often spend part of our Saturdays. We were doing what we loved, picking up the thread we had found that hot summer night so many years ago in Mt. Lebanon Park.
Last but not least, I remember your courage. I could give many examples of this. You once explained to me that during your first experience of being under fire in Vietnam, you said to yourself that if you could get through this you could get through anything. But even long before that, as a scruffy kid with long hair, you would stand up to crew-cutted, musclebound bullies rather than allow them the satisfaction of thinking they could intimidate you. We would sometimes get into fights with such types, usually getting the worst of it. When you were discharged from the army and we started our band in Squirrel Hill, our first gig was playing to a packed house at Skibo Hall, the old Carnegie Mellon student union. You stood up on the stage with your guitar and sang every single verse of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” That was gutsy.
I will miss you until we meet again:
Where the charming roses bloom forever
and where separation comes no more.