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Feature Piece from The Lima News, Sunday, March 24, 2002, Jean Engstrom's Column, page E9.

Dr. Emmett Murray, Jr. and wife, Polly, retired to Fort Myers, Florida several years ago.  He is well-known as a family doctor, as a Lima native, as a docent at the Allen County Museum after retirement, and as one of the Murray sons who lived on Hazel Avenue and attended Horace Mann School.  He also wears the moniker"Duke".  Polly was a long-time docent at the museum.

Recently I learned about his writing.  Yes, he is a writer.  A very good storyteller who has a talent for using the right words and phrases to place you where he wants you, to tell you just enough so that you want to know more, and then to end the story with a little flourish.

He began writing memoirs for their four children.  These stories of his"growing-up years" in Lima and his college years bring back so many memories to any of us who grew up in Lima, and about scouting around with a neighbor boy in the Baxter Woods (Graham Addition, now Loretta Place) for hickory nuts and rabbits, and talking with the bums along the railroad tracks.

Our own Mark Twain?  Makes my heart smile -- and often a hearty guffaw issues forth!

--Jean Engstrom

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