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Betty Murphy Tells All From Queen Elizabeth’s Gown to Driving John Kerry
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Wednesday, May 31, 2017
 

STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Betty Murphy turned down an opportunity to be Miss Universe. But the trade she made opened up a world of new opportunities for the young lass from Toronto, Canada.

She ended up rubbing elbows with such movers and shakers as former President Jimmy Carter and Erma Bombeck. And her path eventually brought her to Ketchum where the former Canadian, who sets out the American flag daily in front of her Warm Springs home, ended up deeply enmeshed in Idaho politics.

Murphy’s work on behalf of Blaine County Democrats, the Sun Valley Ski and Heritage Museum and other organizations has led to her being one of four women named to the 2017 Blaine County Heritage Court. She will be inducted in a ceremony at 3 p.m. Sunday, June 11, at the Liberty Theatre in Hailey, along with Sue Rowland, Grace Eakins and Edith Conrad.

Murphy was born in 1933 in her grandmother’s house into a close knit Scottish family with seven aunts and uncles on each side and 29 first cousins. It was the height of the Great Depression. But her father, a printer who excelled in creating reproductions for museums, was never out of work.

Nor did they go hungry, as Murphy’s mother loaded the table with crumpets and jam, steak and kidney pie, butter tarts, soda biscuits and root vegetables like cabbage, turnips and potatoes (There was no salad since Murphy’s father considered it rabbit food).

“My mother was always there at home, except for a brief time when she made armaments—bullets—during the war. I double dated with my cousins. Toronto was a very safe city—thanks to kindness, gun control and the Royal Mounted Police, of course. We didn’t have TV, but every Friday night we went to school sock dances where we danced to Frank Sinatra. And during winter we skated at the park under the lights.”

Named Miss Cheerleader, Murphy dated the school quarterback, who was given only three downs to make 10 yards. Upon graduation, she got a gig with the Canadian National Exhibition, serving as a guide for then-Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown.

“We were subjects of England at that time so we sang, ‘God Save the King’—Queen Elizabeth’s father George was king then,” she recalled. “The dress was beautiful, made out of heavy satin and decked out in jewels. I had to know everything there was to know about who Princess Elizabeth married, who was in the wedding party, how much the dress was worth.”

As a former Miss Cheerleader, Murphy decided to try out for Miss Toronto in 1953 when she turned 20. Going up against 487 applicants, she spent nearly a month parading across the stage with 24 others at a time. Applicants were not required to give speeches or perform talents then.

“I never forget how embarrassed I was because the nurse had to reach into our swimsuits to make sure we were real. Any hint of silicone and you were out,” she said.

Upon winning, Murphy was ushered into a whirlwind of parades and ribbon cuttings at grocery stores when representatives of the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Chamber of Commerce invited her to be their guest for 10 days to talk to their Rotary and Kiwanis clubs and appear in a fashion show.

Betty, who was engaged to a longtime schoolmate at the time, asked if she could bring her parents along since she had never been out of Ontario before. And on her arrival she found herself conducting an interview with a young reporter for the Miami Herald’s Fort Lauderdale bureau.

“Pat tried to get out of the assignment initially,” Murphy recalled. “But, the interview got longer and longer as he asked me what I thought of the King and Queen. And at the end he asked if I would like to see Miami Beach.”

The two buzzed to Miami in a convertible that Ford Motor Company had loaned to Betty. They danced at a hotel nightclub and walked barefoot along the beach. The next day Pat was back to take her to Key West.

“He called his parents, who lived in Coral Gables, as we were making our way to their house and told his mother that he was going to ask me to marry him,” recalled Murphy. “We dated every day for 10 days until I had to go back.”

Pat Murphy followed up her visit with four-page love letters, asking if he could meet the rest of her family at Christmas. The two married over the holidays, honeymooning at the Royal Albert Hotel and holding a reception for his and Betty’s large extended family at the Royal York Hotel, which at that time was the most famous hotel in the Western hemisphere.

“We dated for 10 days and were married for 58 years,” she said of her husband who passed away in 2011. “He was the most interesting person I’d ever met. He was just back from fighting in Korea and he was so charming and exciting. The boy I had been engaged to ended up helping to perfect the tracking system for the Polaris missile so we eventually got to have lunch with him while he was at Cape Canaveral.

Murphy never regretted not taking part in what was just the second year of the Miss Universe contest.

“It’s a full-time job being a beauty queen. You can’t go out of your house without makeup. And modeling is not my cup of tea.”

In Florida Murphy was ushered into a world of lavish dinners and parties put on by the Miami Herald while her husband covered the crime beat and worked with the likes of Al Neuharth, who went on to found USA Today. She found herself on TV a lot, answering questions about what she, a Canadian, thought about the Royal Family.

She also found herself in the company of John F. Kennedy, whose family had a compound at Palm Beach, and Richard Nixon, who had a house in the Florida Keys. She watched her daughter—now Kathy Carsons—play tennis with tennis champion Chris Evert Lloyd—“Chrissy always won,” she said.

Come evenings she’d prepare a picnic dinner for Pat and daughters Kathy and Patti while they swam in Biscayne Bay.

“There was no air conditioning in those days so the hotels would close during the summer when the humidity was 100 percent. The locals had the beaches to themselves,” she recalled.

Betty wrote and organized three cabarets on behalf of the Junior Women’s Club, which was made up of 350 women between the ages of 18 and 35. They sold out the auditorium Jackie Gleason broadcast out of and employed the man who invented audio for airplane seats to run sound. And they raised enough funds to have two dentists work full time providing free dental care to youngsters who couldn’t afford it.

For her efforts, Murphy was named Outstanding Young Woman of the Year when she was 35.

Four years later she and Pat found themselves in Phoenix, Ariz., where Pat had been named editor of the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette.

“Barry Goldwater and John McCain came to Pat Murphy when they wanted to run for president the first time. Other legislators would ask him how to vote. He’s always say, ‘Vote how you think. If I don’t like it, I will let you know,’ ” Betty recalled.

In Arizona Betty helped with the annual fundraiser for the American Red Cross and served on the board of the Alzheimer’s Association, spurred on by her mother’s eight-year battle with Alzheimer’s.

The Murphys attended hundreds of speeches and benefits on the busy Phoenix political circuit.

But, every once in awhile, they were able to take time out for hilarious evenings with “Family Circus” cartoonist Bil Keane and Erma Bombeck, who parodied suburban life in such books as “The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank” and “If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I doing in the Pits?”

“They looked at the world totally different from us,” said Murphy. “I remember talking to Erma before going to her house for dinner, and she said, ‘I’m so insecure I set the table two weeks ago and covered it with Saran Wrap!’ ”

To escape Phoenix’s 115-degree days, Betty began visiting Sun Valley, where her daughter Kathy Carsons and her husband Paul, a former ski champion from Betty’s hometown of Toronto, had settled.  And when Pat retired she got him to join her in the home she had bought in 1993 in Warm Springs.

She met Wendy Jaquet over coffee hour at the Presbyterian Church of the Big Wood and Jaquet promptly enlisted her to begin volunteering at the Ketchum/Sun Valley Chamber and, later, on her campaign for state legislature. Murphy worked on Jaquet’s campaign for the next 18 years.

“Being married to a newspaper guy, I had always had to be an observer. And in Canada campaigns are restricted to six weeks.  But I thought Wendy was pretty qualified,” said Murphy.

“She’s done everything from writing people’s names on envelopes providing information about absentee voting to decorating the Blaine County Democrats floats for Wagon Days,” said Jaquet. “She’s made hundreds of phone calls and recruited precinct people. And she’s been involved on state level with Democratic women caucus. She’s always so reliable. I could ask her if she would do something and I could be pretty sure she would.”

Murphy served six years as chair of the Blaine County Democrats helping to build up the party—1,300 people turned out at the party’s caucus in 2008. She registered 800 voters during that period.

Driving Sun Valley’s part-time resident John Kerry when he was running for President was a full-time chore.

“We were given 24 hours notice when he came here and we’d drive him to the ski resort, to lunch, to meetings since you’re not allowed to drive when running for President,” Murphy said. “He came with the Washington Press corps and personal staff so we had two dozen people to drive around.”

Though Murphy describes working with the Democrats as a full-time job, she still found time to volunteer with the Blaine Manor Auxiliary, now the Blaine Belles, and the Wood River Hospice.

The last Hospice patient she cared for was a little boy who just wanted to live long enough to ski one more time. He died that Halloween, she recalled.

Murphy also volunteered with the former Sun Valley/Ketchum Ski and Heritage Museum for 12 years where she was especially thrilled to display the Olympic uniform and medals of Gretchen Fraser, the Sun Valley racer who became the first American to medal in Olympic alpine skiing in 1948.

Her biggest project was saving the small white church house that used to house Louie’s restaurant.

“We heard it was going to be demolished and in an hour we had raised enough money to have it moved,” she said. “We spent seven years going before the City Council asking for a permanent place and finally it found at home with the Picket Fence.”

Today, she says, her biggest job is taking her much spoiled labs Spud and Tater for their morning walks in Adams Gulch.

“I can’t understand people who complain about anything in this community,” she said. “It’s paradise—why don’t they know it? I feel very fortunate to live here. And it’s not a big effort to help it.”

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