Word: murphey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Curiously, the real thing, nuclear war, was mentioned hardly at all. Federal Signal Corp. did push its big civil-defense sirens ("The wavering sound," explained Salesman Jerry Koster, "is when there's an actual attack"), but / only Walter Murphey came to Indianapolis eager to talk about war. Murphey, 73, is executive director of the American Civil Defense Association, an 800-member group that agitates, without much success, for federally funded bomb shelters. "That's our hang-up," he said. "Our reason for being is nuclear attack." Despite a voice just like Jimmy Stewart's and an utterly genial manner, Murphey...
...vast, whom to rescue and whom to mend? Where to erect the police barricades? Theirs is not so much a fascination with disaster as it is a half-religious, half-martial hankering to see what they can do to help. Nuclear holocaust would be too big to handle. Murphey, for all his quixotic zeal, understands perfectly the indifference to his brand of civil defense. "The idea of a huge disaster, a war -- that just floors people. They really won't think about it. But a fire, a flood, a tornado . . . Well," he said, "there you've got something...
...says, "It wasn't until I began to sing my own songs that I had real success." He married young, like Jess, and like him divorced his Jewish wife to start a new life, as they say in the movies, outside the faith. Neil and the former Marcia Murphey of Columbus have two sons, Jesse, 10, and Micah, 3, and homes in Malibu and Beverly Hills. "It's only in the past ten years that I have been making large salaries," Neil says. "I have a couple of holding corporations behind...