William Francis Murphy
Salem, VA
A Mass of Christian Burial for William Francis Murphy, age 90, will be held Saturday, October 8, 2016 at 1:00 P.M. at St. Anthony Catholic Church, Lismore, MN, with Fr. Andrew Beerman officiating. Burial will be in the St. Anthony Catholic Cemetery, Lismore, MN, with full military honors provided by the Lismore American Legion. William died peacefully at home Tuesday afternoon, September 27, 2016. He was 90.
Bill was born on July 29, 1926 in Holyoke, MA. He moved to Orlando, FL. with his parents about 1940. Bill received his amateur radio license in 1942 and remained an active ham the rest of his life. He graduated high school in 1942 and was an announcer at WLOF around that time. This is where he first learned to ‘speak’ professionally.
In 1944, Bill joined the Navy V12 program that provided the officers who would command the landing crafts that were to be used in the invasion of Japan.
He met Bernice Gengler, a Navy nurse who was a farm girl from southwest Minnesota, at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital while he recuperated from surgery. They became friends and spent much of their spare time together. The third time he proposed, she said, “I guess I’ll have to.” They married April 3, 1948. She left the Navy when she became pregnant; Bill left the Navy in 1949. They moved to Providence, RI., where he attended Brown University and finished his EE degree.
In 1951, he joined the Western Electric Co. and was soon installing radar systems on Navy ships. (While watching many WWII movies, he’d look at a destroyer and say, “That’s a Mark 21 radar; I installed a number of them. They didn’t come out until well after the war was over.”) Bill worked for Western Electric for 37 years in a variety of positions. Through travelling stints in marketing, he further polished his speaking voice.
Bill and Bernice lived in a number of places including New Jersey and Massachusetts, but didn’t have a place they called ‘home’ until they retired and moved to Salem, VA.
Bill was a faithful Roman Catholic all of his life; he and Bernice had a special devotion to Mary. He began lectoring at Mass in the mid-’60s, and continued until recently when his voice declined. Many parishioners at OLPH Church in Salem loved when he read because his was “the voice of God”.
He loved his wife, his family and ham radio. He was an avid reader of fiction, non-fiction and naval history. He loved many of the puns found in “Pearls Before Swine”. Above all, he was a gentleman.
He was a longtime member of the Knights of Columbus, IEEE, and ARRL.
His wife died in 2001; they were married 54 years. He leaves his troops Michael (Nancy), Glenn (Cherie), Craig (Karen), Roy (Cynthia), Mark, Neal, Eileen (Arlen Schrock) and Anne Marie (John Itzin), nine grandchildren and one great-grandson. He leaves his sister Aileen (Stanley Broome) and his brother Edward, both of Georgia.
To view online obit, please visit www.dingmannandsons.com.
