From the time that Mr. Gerry Murphy began teaching at Wellesley (MA) High School in 1962, he was a rebel with a cause. An advocate for human decency, Gerry’s inherent humanity was so palpable that the students in his charge instantly trusted him. As the 1960’s unfolded, his unfettered liberalism got him into a heap of trouble at times during his early years in Wellesley. An avowed Democrat teaching in a then conservative Republican community, Murph was looked on skeptically at best by a school administration who never knew what to do about him. Despite his so-called radicalism, even they viewed him as an outstanding teacher who seemed to get the very best out of his students.

A man of multiple passions, one of Gerry Murphy’s most sustaining ones was his love for both baseball and his beloved Boston Red Sox. That he shared such widespread interest in the local professional baseball team with the legendary principal of Wellesley High School at the time, Mr. Sam Graves, was fortunate. As the longtime head of the senior high throughout the tumultuous 1960s, Sam Graves viewed Mr. Murphy, despite their shared Red Sox passion, as a dangerous insurgent, an instructor who encouraged his students to support civil and human rights, and protest war unless it was justified, and seek equality for those without a voice.

As Gerry later told me, “During those first few years at Wellesley High, I was always walking on eggshells. I knew that the administration respected me as a teacher, but I was viewed as their domestic version of Ho Chi Minh.”

Thus, when the booming voice of Sam Graves himself came onto the Wellesley High School sound system one September morning in 1969, bellowing, “MR. MURPHY – PLEASE REPORT TO THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE IMMEDIATELY!” Gerry, who was teaching a history class, died a thousand deaths. The kids, who would have normally kidded him, turned dead quiet in his classroom.

Amidst the stunned silence in his room, Gerry, now ghostly-white, got up from his chair, and sighed to his students, “Hopefully, I will see you later. If not, one of you can identify my body.”

He then sprinted down three flights to Graves’ office, reviewing, in his Rolodex-like memory, “What the hell could I have said that would have gotten the old man so riled up?”

When he reached the first floor and arrived at the principal’s office, there stood the mythical Sam Graves himself, guarding his door like a goalie in a Stanley Cup final. “GET IN HERE!” barked the principal as he pointed to his office.

By now covered with sweat, Gerry Murphy meekly walked into the office and then slumped into the chair in front of Graves’ Resolute-sized desk. The Wellesley principal measured Gerry’s face, paused, and said sternly, “GERRY……” – Murph later said it was the longest pause in human history – “I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAY THIS……BUT THE RED SOX JUST FIRED DICK WILLIAMS!”

In the next three seconds, Gerry processed that he was NOT in trouble; he was not going to be fired – and thus he was understandably relieved beyond measure. After the surge of relief had calmed his heart, however, Murph then processed that his beloved baseball team had just inexplicably sacked the best manager the franchise had had in his then nearly 34 years on the planet.

“How the hell could they do that?” Gerry Murphy roared back at Graves.

“I was thinking the same thing,” remarked his irate boss and fellow Sox devotee.

For anyone privileged to have Gerry Murphy as a teacher, you soon learned that even the most trivial of information fascinated Gerry. He loved the absurdity of facts that framed much of history and relished sharing such knowledge with his troops. Over time, we grasped that Hannibal Hamlin from Maine was Lincoln’s first vice-president. We learned that “Walpole’s own” Edward F. “Butch” Songin was the Patriots’ first quarterback back in 1960. Predictability, Pete Best, the Beatles’ initial drummer, was forever entrenched in Gerry’s personal Hall of Fame.

An innately curious person, Gerry Murphy was especially fascinated with the mundane for two fundamental reasons. As he said to me one time, “First, it adds color to the black-and-white world of history, and, secondly, you never know when you might find a remote fact useful in some way.” That he had a prodigious memory whose bandwidth of knowledge was seemingly limitless only added to the luster. Given his passion for life, his varied interests enabled him to launch into a series of facts that were almost mind-numbing.

For instance, Gerry remembered that Zellio Toppazzini played with his older brother, Jerry, on the Boston Bruins. He could rattle off every T stop on both the Green and Red Lines of the famed Boston Subway System. He could easily name every Secretary of State, beginning with Jefferson. (Cordell Hull was the Secretary on December 20, 1935, Murph’s birthdate). Gerry could also list the deejays on the old 1510 WMEX Boston – regardless of the year. (While Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg was always a favorite, he inevitably thought that Melvin X Melvin had the best moniker. As Murph remarked, “You heard his name and assumed that he was associated with Elijah Muhammad until you realized he was some white guy from Nahant.”)

Consequently, when Wellesley High School began to institute a Seminar Day, an annual May focus on “alternative learning” in which students could take “a participatory class” and learn something different from one or more of its teachers, Gerry logically proposed a Trivia Panel as one of the offerings. Over the next two decades, Mr. Murphy and a small circle of peers, including veteran history instructor Charlie Burgess, would annually meet 50-70 students in a very crowded classroom in order to stump their teachers with individual trivia questions from the audience. Not surprisingly, the Trivia Panel Seminar became a staple for two generations of Wellesley High School students. Naturally, his charges began to ask Gerry, “Can a student ever be on the Trivia Panel?”

“Ah,” Murph would reply, “sometime this year in one of my classes, I am going to ask a certain question. If anyone actually answers it – that scholar will be on the panel that year. I guarantee it. But don’t worry – it will never happen.”

Therefore on one dreary March morning in 1973 in Humanities class, Gerry began to wax poetic about one of his favorite subjects, Jack Kennedy. We had no idea then that he was setting us up for the question that no student could ever possibly answer. “You know,” Gerry recalled, “future President Kennedy upset a very distinguished Massachusetts Republican, Henry Cabot Lodge, in the 1952 senatorial campaign, and we all know that JFK defeated Richard Nixon in 1960 for the presidency. However, John F. Kennedy also ran for reelection to the United States Senate from Massachusetts in 1958. What obscure GOP candidate did John Fitzgerald Kennedy defeat that year for his reelection to the Senate?”

When Mr. Murphy completed his question, he smiled, pleased with himself, knowing that no pupil in that classroom would be able to answer it correctly. I instantly raised my hand. “Yes, Shaun,” Gerry smirked.

“The Honorable Vincent Celeste of East Boston,” I replied.

For once in his life, Gerry Murphy was speechless. As he searched for something to say, I continued, “And the interesting thing about Celeste was that he also ran against Jack Kennedy in 1950 for Congress – and got trounced that time as well!”

“My God!” Murph finally responded after the shock had worn off. “A student, Shaun Kelly, is on this year’s Trivia Panel!”

I then received my only standing ovation as a student. My peers then had the audacity to shout at their beloved teacher: “The oligarchy is over! Democracy reigns!” (Gerry characteristically LOVED the class’s response).

A decade later, when Mr. Murphy and I spent a year together in England teaching at the American School while he was on sabbatical, he asked, “How the hell did you know the answer to that question?”

“Remember, Murph,” I responded, “I have been as obsessed with Jack Kennedy as you have been. I mean how many people do you know who can recite the entire Vaughn Meader-JFK album from beginning to end? Thus, the question you asked your students I had already asked myself previously. One winter’s day, I traipsed down to the Wellesley Free Library from Radcliffe Road, dug up the information from some old copies of The Globe, and voila!”  

“I should have known,” Gerry sighed. “A man after my own heart.”

Later that May, when more than 400 students and faculty attended the 1973 Trivia Panel Seminar in a teeming Science Lecture Hall, Mr. Murphy, of course, dominated the proceedings, faultlessly answering questions connected to history, geography, science, current events, and the background to the street names in Wellesley. However, when I successfully named the four original Crickets by name (Gerry only knew Buddy Holly and was duly impressed when I came up with Niki Sullivan, Jerry Allison, and Joe B. Mauldin), and then followed up by accurately answering the name of the inventor of the modern toilet – Thomas “I Kid You Not” Crapper, Murph called me, “The Proverbial Ringer.” Of course, to add to the hilarity, when no one on the panel could come up with an especially challenging student inquiry, Gerry would shout back, “THAT isn’t trivia!”

Reflecting on that experience – the first time his little trivia exercise “had gone viral,” Gerry referred to it as the panel’s Beatles-Shea Stadium moment. Ten years later, when I showed Gerry a picture of the panel and the packed Science Lecture Hall that day, I kidded him about his legendary plaid pants and his luxuriant mustache. “What was the idea behind the Reginald Van Gleason fashion statement, Murph?” I asked.

“Pure intimidation, Shaun. It was my ‘Rollie Fingers run-amuck look.”

For those of you who didn’t know Gerry, the kind of intimacy he had with one of his students, in this case, me, might surprise you. But to those who had the privilege of having him as either a history, economics, political science, English, or Humanities teacher at Wellesley High, you are probably nodding your head in agreement right now. In a profoundly shitty time in our lives, adolescence, Murph turned out to be our own Catcher in the Rye. Ultimately, he was an adult Holden who cared and was always there for me and all of his charges.

In retrospect, his reach was so expansive that I eventually became a teacher because of Gerry Murphy. Like all great instructors, he believed in the old Cherokee adage – “To give dignity to another is above all things.” As a teacher, Gerry was a pocket Merlin; his magic inspired others to think beyond their own boundaries and reach to the heavens if need be. From the time I really got to know him as a senior in his storied vaunted Humanities class, he was a difference-maker. His empathy was telepathic; he just knew when he needed to reach out to you. For those who knew him in his eighty-three years on the planet, Murph camped out in one’s soul and never left.

During my senior year in Humanities class, we read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. We studied Larry Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development. We analyzed Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. We even took on William Manchester’s dictionary-sized historical tract, The Glory and the Dream. We wrote many papers – the most important being Gerry’s celebrated assignment, “The Personal Essay,” (AKA “The Self Paper”), in which each student wrote from the heart about where they were in life at that moment – and where they wanted to go in the future. Mr. Murphy’s notes decorated each paper like Hazel’s Bakery icing. In each pupil’s essay, he applauded; questioned, coaxed, probed, and gave advice that would often encapsulate who you are and what you should be.

At the end of my essay, Gerry wrote, “While you might not make the big leagues – your current dream – I have a strong hunch that you could make an even more deep-seated difference as a teacher down the road. It fits you, Shaun.” 46 years after he wrote this to me, I am about to conclude my 39th year as a teacher. In many ways, Murph knew me better than I knew myself. As the late, great Red Sox announcer, Ned Martin, might say, “Mercy.”

Once under the spell of such a potent influence, you never say goodbye. Consequently, a decade after I graduated from Wellesley High School, I was in my third year of teaching when I learned that that Head of our Middle School had decided to go on sabbatical the following academic year. Because I was now employed at The American School in England, I contacted Gerry immediately.

During the previous Christmas break, I had flown back home and had spent some time with Murph at his 1 Standish Road, Wellesley abode. He stated to me at the time, “If anything opens up there that you think might be interesting for me, give me a shout. I’ve always wanted to live in Great Britain for a spell, and I have a year’s sabbatical coming up.”

After I alerted him to the job opening, Gerry flew over to London and then made his way to our seventy-acre campus, which was situated just eighteen miles southwest of London in Thorpe, Surrey. He ended up charming the pants off the TASIS administration and was offered the year’s position as Middle School Director on the spot. For the 1983-84 academic year, Gerry Murphy would be a colleague, and we would spend hundreds of hours together socializing and venturing around the environs of London proper.

Previously, his career had been in the classroom as a teacher. At TASIS England, Murph ended as an administrator without any instructional responsibilities. Happily, he ended up being an extraordinary boss – beloved by his teachers, the students, and the parent body for his sagacity, wit, and abiding charm. When Gerry applied for the History Department Chairpersonship at Wellesley High a few years later, I addressed the Wellesley School Committee at a special session, reminding them that I was the only one in the room who had observed Mr. Murphy as a leader. I spoke to them about his prodigious insight as an educator; his visionary sensibility; his ability to walk in the shoes of others; his ability to inspire teachers and pupils alike. When Wellesley High School officials decided not to appoint Gerry as the head of his department, it turned out to be their loss. Individuals in positions of power sometimes can be such little people. My associates at TASIS England were chagrined that Wellesley High School marginalized such an educational giant.

Still, we had an absolute ball across the pond. Murph and I met for lunch and dinner virtually every day, and frequented the local pub, The Red Lion, regularly, where a local Brit, providentially named Gerald, used to refer to us as “his colonial friends.” (Yes, Gerry LOVED that). We made a handful of treks to London, taking in all of the history of that remarkable city together. “God, this is great!” Gerry remarked one Saturday afternoon as we skirted over Waterloo Bridge together. Dale Pfiffner, one of our teaching colleagues, used to accompany us in our travels. When Gerry died earlier this month, Dale posted this remembrance:

“I got to know Gerry Murphy in his sabbatical year (1983-84) as colleagues at TASIS School near London. How fortunate I was indeed to know and spend time with him. Whenever I was with him, it was as if I had this fabulous teacher as a personal tutor and mentor. I very vividly recall one instance while at Eton College in Windsor, he recited the oft-heard phrase, “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” (At the time, I never really understood what it meant.) He proceeded to regale me with a fascinating explanation of the significance of the site on which we stood. What a storyteller! I came to realize why Shaun always spoke so highly of him as an educator and mentor. We truly stood on the shoulders of a giant.”

When Murph and I visited Churchill’s secret bunker in World War II a block from 10 Downing Street, the normally gregarious Gerry was hushed by visiting such hallowed ground. As we left, he reverently quoted Sir Winston’s words about the RAF and the Battle of Britain, which had been said right from the communications room in the cachet we had just visited: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.” He brushed away a tear and then said fiercely, “I almost forgot that Churchill was a colonialist of the worst kind!” I then quoted Claude Rains from Casablanca and accused him of being a “rank sentimentalist.”

“It takes one to know one,” Gerry replied.

Over drinks at a London pub later that afternoon, he proposed that we write a travelogue of our experiences in England and call it, Mind the Gap. In my list of many regrets in life that Gerry and I never followed up on that suggestion will remain high on my list until the day I die.

Even in Merry Old England, baseball remained an enduring passion for us both. One memorable evening, we stayed up together to listen to a Red Sox game on Armed Forces radio. “I never thought I’d listen to Ken Coleman and Joe Castiglione in Europe!” he joked between innings. Gerry was delighted when I announced to him that I was asked to pitch for the local Cobham Yankees of the British Baseball League. “It’s a long way from Hunnewell Field and hurling against the Natick Redmen!” he joked to me.

Consequently, each Saturday that spring, Gerry would loyally sit in our mostly empty stands and watch me throw against other squads, made up of ex-pats, Canadians, and Brits. He LOVED the fact that I asked the opposing manager what nationality each player in their batting order was. Because Americans and Canadians habitually have trouble with low pitches, I threw everything low to them. However, when a British national approached home plate, I purposely aimed high because of the English players’ prowess for hitting balls low in cricket. “American ingenuity, personified,” Murph called it when I explained it to him.

When I also informed Gerry that the BBL had decided to go from the DH to National League rules for the 1984 season, he said, “Then it is nothing less than the rebirth of Hank Aguirre!”

For the uninformed (as Murph would say), Hank Aguirre was perhaps the worst hitting pitcher ever. A longtime Detroit Tigers ace, there were years in which he never had one base hit in 70 plate appearances. When I reminded him that I hadn’t hit since my Wellesley High School days because of the DH rule in both college and during my time with the Brighton Braves of the Boston Park League, Gerry countered, “Ah, hell, forget all of that Teddy Ballgame, Science of Hitting crap. Just close your eyes and swing!”

During one memorable contest in May, after I had commenced with my third inning of work, I noticed a middle-aged man and his wife approach the field timidly as I began my windup. After the pitch, it appeared that they seemed stunned that they had stumbled onto a baseball game in an archetypal English town eighteen miles west of London. Slowly, they sat down in the stands behind our dugout and watched the game silently.

As I sauntered off the mound to end the inning, my face broke into a broad smile. I recognized the gentleman, the Commissioner of Baseball at the time, Bowie Kuhn, who was then on vacation in the UK! Accompanying him was his longtime spouse, Luisa.

“Mr. Commissioner and Mrs. Kuhn, welcome to the British Baseball League!” I screeched to them as I approached our bench.

Bowie Kuhn cackled audibly and replied, “Luisa and I are on vacation, and we stumbled upon your game here as we were visiting St. Mary’s Church over there behind the field! And what do we see? Baseball! Right here in the heart of Merry Olde England!”

Mr. Kuhn then asked me where I was from. I replied, “Wellesley, Massachusetts, Sir.”

The Kuhns collectively lit up like a scoreboard. “That’s where our daughter went to college!” they shouted simultaneously. Mrs. Kuhn then added, “Isn’t Hathaway Bookshop the greatest anywhere, Shaun?”

When I nodded in the affirmative, I then introduced the Commissioner and his wife to a nonplussed Gerry, who immediately charmed the pants off of the Kuhns as play continued.

“Hey, Shaun,” our catcher called out a few minutes. “You’re up.”

I politely excused myself, went up to hit. As I got into the batter’s box, Gerry called out, “Just close your eyes and swing!”

What the hell,” I thought to myself. “Murph usually knows what he’s talking about.” The opposing pitcher then would up and fired the ball toward home. I instantly shut my eyes and promptly launched a home run that hit the top of a European ash tree 75 feet beyond the rickety left-field fence, well over 400 feet in left-center – the farthest ball I ever hit in my life. Gerry later said, “It was like Hank Aguirre hitting a Tony C. shot onto the Mass Pike.”

As I rounded the bases, Murph, never at a loss of words, nudged Bowie Kuhn’s shoulder and barked, “Mr. Commissioner, you’ve now seen two historic home runs: Henry Aaron’s 715th – and Shaun Kelly’s first.”  

Indeed, he had.

Of course, baseball framed many of our times together when Gerry and I returned to Massachusetts in June 1984. I began teaching at the Fessenden School in West Newton and later attended Harvard, where I secured a Masters in Education. In 1986, after what Gerry referred to as “A Crime Against Humanity, Perpetrated by John McNamara,” Gerry and I decided to attend an early Sox game at Fenway the following April in order to show support to our star-crossed team. In the end, Roger Clemens pitched a complete three-hitter, striking out six and walking no one in an impressive victory by the Boston nine over Kansas City.

What I most remember about that contest, however, occurred in the bottom of the fifth inning. The Sox were already up, 8-0, and the Royals had gone hitless to that moment. With two out in the inning, future Red Sox first base coach, Frank White, hit a little dribbler up the third baseline for a hit. Given the fact that Boston was up by a touchdown and a two-point conversion with the best hurler on the planet at that time in total control, you would think that there would be little if no reaction in the old ballpark. But, no, this was Boston, pre-2004, with the trauma of ’86 still infecting us all. Thus, when a fan then yelled out, “Here they go again!” Gerry laughed heartily, turned around to the people sitting behind us, and shouted, “Buy that man a beer!”

15 years later, when I was asked by HBO to be one of the eight Red Sox fan interviewees for what would be an Emmy-Award-winning series, The Curse of the Bambino and its follow-up, The Reverse of the Curse of the Bambino, Gerry couldn’t be prouder. “One of our own!” Gerry proclaimed as he cheered for me when I appeared on his television screen back at 1 Standish Road. When I mentioned in the film, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” as an allegory representing all Red Sox fans, Murph later quipped to me, “You learned well from Humanities, Shaun. I told you that story could be useful sometime!”

“Thanks, Gerry,” I responded, “but they cut out my best line that I used throughout the entire ninety-minute interview, and dammit, I intentionally said it in Gerry Murphy-like fashion!”

“What the hell did you say that they then cut out of the documentary?” Murph asked.

“That I would root for the North Koreans before I would root for the Yankees,” I replied.

Gerry’s laughter echoed through my telephone. “Proud to know, ya, Shaun!”

Invariably, like many of his former students, I would periodically check in with Gerry by phone or in person every few months. When we would catch up, our musings were decidedly focused on either baseball or politics. In the last years of his life, even when he was battling cancer, Gerry remained Gerry.

“Bobby Valentine! Bobby Valentine! We had Tito Francona, and we replace him with Bobby Valentine? It’s reverse American history. We just replaced Abraham Lincoln with James Buchanan!”

“Trump thinks that every one of those damn buildings he names after himself will somehow conjure up an image of Versailles. What he doesn’t know is that when people like me see one of his structures, it smacks of Route 1, Schaeffer Stadium, and Billy Sullivan.”

“Craig Kimbrel is the gasoline that can amplify any fire.”

“How can they actually support that clown? Forty percent of the country has amnesia while the rest of us are suffering from PTSD!”

“I love Jackie’s glove for sure. He plays the best centerfield I’ve ever seen a Red Sock outfielder play, and that includes Jimmy Piersall. However, if Jackie Bradley, Jr., were a 1960s rock and roll artist, we would refer to him as a one-hit-wonder.”

“Everyone Trump appoints is corrupt. Everyone! They oughta open a new Smithsonian on the Mall and lock all of the bastards up!”

“Can Gronk just play one season, one season, and not get hurt? He is a walking advertisement for Workers’ Compensation.”

“Who would have ever thought that I would be looking back on the presidency of George W. Bush and say, “Ah, the good old days!”

A few weeks before he died, I phoned Gerry for the last time. He was having a good day; Murph was charming, funny as hell, and as
irreverent as always. For 45 minutes we laughed continuously, probably because the alternative was too painful to explore. When I reminded him that the celebrated question he always asked to myriad students during the height of the Cold War, “If only the Russians knew!” might need some revision in 2019, he laughed and responded, “Apparently, the Russians now know everything!”

Gerry then went to his memory-bank bullpen and drew on one of the thousands of quotes he had stored away for the right occasion. In this case, he used the words of Fitzgerald from The Great Gatsby to crystallize Donald Trump and his ilk: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

As we said goodbye, both of us purposely kept it light. The day was too bright, and the alternative was too bleak to spoil the mood. I reminded him that he was present in every one of my lessons at school. Consequently, his magic was still being passed around each day in my classroom. “Well then that gives me some hope then, Shaun – thank you,” he sighed. When Murph ended the call with his longtime refrain, “Don’t let the bastards get you down!” I reflexively chuckled – and so did he.

That was the last laugh we shared.

When he died, I thought back on that conversation and then recalled a passage from one of Gerry’s favorite books, Edwin O’Conner’s iconic novel, The Last Hurrah. As the narrative concludes, the protagonist of the tale, Mayor Frank Skeffington lays dying, surrounded by loved ones and his loyal aides. One of his many acolytes, Ditto Boland, then comes into his bedroom to pay his respects to the great man. Throughout the story, Ditto had done his best to mimic Mayor Skeffington’s manner of speaking, dress, and personality. Predictably, Boland has expressed so few views of his own over the years that he has secured the nickname “Ditto” from Skeffington, an epithet that Boland accepts with unbounded pride because his hero, the Mayor, has bestowed it to him. (Murph would no doubt remind you that Ditto Boland was based on John “Up-Up” Kelly – no relation – a longtime lackey to Boston Mayor James Michael Curley. As Murph recalled in class one time, “Anytime Mayor Curley entered a room, Kelly’s primary job was to bellow, ‘UP, UP, UP for the Mayor’!”)

Accordingly, when Ditto Boland begins to proclaim that the Mayor will surely rise from his bed and run again for mayor as soon as he feels better, the waning Mayor murmurs, “Oh, Ditto, Ditto – how can you thank a man for a million laughs?”

There are thousands of friends and students of Gerry Murphy who are now asking the same thing. For me, it was the bookends of laughter and joy, which framed thousands of conversations we shared together over five decades. While Gerry’s compassion, honesty, and enlightenment defined him, it was his enduring humor and his hearty laugh that still resounds. Ultimately, he made my days brighter and more meaningful because his scintillating presence inevitably cut through the darkest of storm clouds. It is no coincidence that one of Mr. Murphy’s favorite JFK quotes turned out to be his epitaph: “Only three things in life are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since we can do nothing with the first two, we must do what we can with the third.”

At Gerry’s service last Saturday on a beautiful early spring morning in Wellesley, we all learned that his last words on earth were a humble benediction to a life that turned out to be both purposeful and consequential.

“Thank you,” Murph whispered to his minister and family, “thank you.”

No Gerry, thank you. Thank you.