by Dave Warner
Leo (Tom) Murphy was born and raised in Little Falls and attended St Mary’s from kindergarten, right through high school, where he graduated in 1965. He’s back for his class reunion and the Canal Days Celebration, but he’s also here to sign copies of his new book which was just released called ‘In Service‘ which is available on Amazon in both e-book and paperback.
When discussing the reunion he said “We were talking about it last year, and we felt that we probably spent more time together as a class than we did with our siblings. We’re like a big family and a lot of us have stayed close.”
Murphy was a photographer for the high school newspaper, which was then printed by the Evening Times. He said that he had no ambition in school and that his goal “was to not have to repeat a grade. I was happy with anything that wasn’t an F.”
So, with those kinds of grades, all of his friends were going off to college and he wasn’t, so he joined the Army. “I’m sure this has never happened to anyone else, but I got lied to by an Army recruiter,” he said.
He had told them that his ambition was to be a police investigator, so they told him that they could put him directly into that, but that he’d have to join for four years instead of three. “I’m a young kid who doesn’t know nuthin’, so I don’t know one Army organization from another, and they said it would give me exactly what I wanted.”
So, they put him directly into the Army Security Agency. Except that…there’s no police work with the Army Security Agency. It’s communications spying and they mostly sit behind radios, which is what Murphy learned while in basic training.
“So, when I finished basic training and got my orders, I was assigned to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey California. I get out there and find out that it has got nothing to do with police work in any way shape or form,” said Murphy.
What language did they end up teaching him? Albanian. “About a quarter of the way through the course they decide that they have too many Albanian students as interpreters, so they dropped the whole class.”
When dropped, the Army had to figure out what to do with him, so it was infantry. “We’re talkin’ early 1966 and I’m going into the infantry and you know where that leads – Vietnam,” he said.
After serving a tour there, he came back and wanted to be stationed on the East Coast, closer to home. After a lucky meeting with a local congressman, Murphy was able to get his orders changed and he spent the rest of his service time in the Washington DC area, assigned to the Criminal Investigative Division (CID).
He got married just prior to leaving the service, and when he got out, he had no idea what he wanted to do. He sold insurance and did some other things, but none of them interested him.
Murphy’s father was a Goodyear dealer in Herkimer and he needed help in the business. “I was planning on starting a family, and I knew that kids got hurt every once in a while, so I saw a news note in the paper that the Dolgeville Ambulance Corps was putting on a free first aid course.”
So, he thought that it would be a good idea to take the course so that he could deal with any issues that his future family might have. “So I took this basic first aid course and that was really interesting and they said after that they had a CPR course, so I took that, then I took an advanced first aid course.”
After all of that training, a few of the people that took all the courses together were talking about taking another state course in Canajoharie for EMT’s. “Just because it was all so interesting to me, I decided to take the EMT course. I never had any intention of doing anything with it, but was enjoying the learning,” he said.
Murphy took the course and graduated and two weeks later the Little Falls Fire Chief came into the Goodyear store to get his tires changed. He said to Murphy “Somebody told me you took an EMT course.”
The Chief wanted to know why Murphy wasn’t in the Fire Department and he told him that they really needed people. “I really wasn’t interested in fighting fires,” said Murphy.
But the Chief persisted and convinced him that being an EMT would not have him fighting fires. “So, that’s how I got into EMS.”
When he moved from Little Falls to Orlando Florida, there was a huge difference in the number and types of EMS calls. Murphy said that he wanted to find a way to deal with all of the ‘heavy stuff’. “When I got home at night, if I’d had a tough day, a way to avoid burn-out or PTSD was to write it out. Kind of spill your guts, and then you could put it all away.”
He started writing in 2004 and one day at work, he was telling a guy a story and the guy said “You told that story just like you had read it. I told him actually, I had just written it and proceeded to tell him what I was doing. He said, you know, you’ve got a book there, you might want to think about that.”
Over the years, several people mentioned that to him, and eventually, he thought “Maybe it would make a book.” Which is exactly what he did.
“I’ve put them into chapters and kind of grouped stories. There’s ‘calls that didn’t go especially well’ because somebody there didn’t have a clue as to what they were doing,” he said. “But I felt that it couldn’t be a whole book of those, so I started putting other things in like people calling for a sore throat, and a chapter on ‘why did you call?'”
Murphy also worked for an air ambulance corps that had a fixed-wing division and he put a chapter in about that as well.
He also included a chapter about his Army years in the book and as he was working on it, he was trying to figure out what he was going to call it. “I’ve got EMS, Army, Fire Department…these are all service things, and I thought In Service.”
Murphy said “In Service has a lot of connotations. When you get in the ambulance in the morning, you call the dispatcher and say that you are in service. When you go into the Army people say, oh, you went in the service. And I got to thinking about what the first thing I ever did that was In Service.”
“I got to thinking about being an altar boy. It’s referred to as ‘serving mass’, so there’s service there too,” he said. “And thus started my life of service.”
The book ‘In Service’ is a whole life story according to Murphy and to this day, he is still working part-time as an EMT in Orlando Florida.
Murphy will be available at the Little Falls Historical Society from 1-4 pm today (Thursday) and Friday to sign copies of his book. “It’s funny, I had no idea how many books to order for this, but I hope I run out,” he said.