Sunday, November 23, 2014

Murray Edwards Part 2

After the success Cathy, Murray and I had playing for the grade school and the local elite that formed the music club, we were in some demand.  We provided entertainment for the annual Farm Bureau meeting one year.  We played for thirty minutes while folks gathered and socialized.  We were the “front” for the speaker who did a “power point” (a slide show in those olden days) on boot posts.  He travelled Western states in his line of work and had taken hundreds of photos of old boots decorating fence posts and outbuildings around the country.  He had developed a humorous monologue to accompany his photos and was really quite entertaining.
      The featured speaker got off on the wrong foot with Murray.  We were about fifteen minutes into our thirty minutes when the guy decided he needed to get his screen and projector coordinated.  He put up his screen front and center stage, about five or six feet in front of Murray.  We finished the number we were working on.  Murray shifted his bow to his left hand, holding both bow and violin.  Instead of launching into our next number, Cathy and I watched as Murray pushed the screen away stage right.
    The poor boot fellow knew he had got the boot.  He waited till we were done to finish his prep.  He didn’t endear himself to Murray when he said at the beginning of his program that he wished he could play the piano like that fellow (me!).   Maybe it was payback for Murray who was the star. (Murray always referred to the rhythm folks in the band as his “seconds.”)
      Murray was a great favorite with little kids.  He played a game where he would take a small toy and toss it across the room.  The child would retrieve it for him.  After a few tosses, Murray would fake the toss and quickly hide the toy in his lap beneath his left hand.  The kid would look and look until Murray would find the toy in midair.  Magic! 
     Once Murray had about worn the game out, but Tisha wasn’t ready to quit.  She brought the toy to him and begged him, “Dissappear it!”  Murray got quite kick out of that phrase.  Rarely was he too busy to “disappear” something for Tisha.               
       Murray was an artist as well as a musician.  He took up painting in his sixties. (Check out Lawrence World Herald article for a fuller story of Murray’s art career. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19700706&id=RUsxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=OOYFAAAAIBAJ&pg=7130,614186) He did leather work all his life.  During the thirties, with a wife and young family, he trekked to the west coast.  Besides the hard times, their young son was diagnosed with dust pneumonia, a result of the “dust bowl”.  He did not follow the Joad family in trying to make a living fruit picking or other ag-based labor.  Instead, he hired out to a saddle-maker.  He was quite good at tooling leather.  He made many of his leatherworking tools himself.  When a son-in-law dentist discarded dental tools, Murray used them to make specialized leather working tools.  He had quite a few of the “tooth picks”.  I still have three that he shared with me.
     An interesting story from the West Coast days came from son Clifford who was an English professor at Fort Hays University.  He taught three or four classes I took while getting my master’s degree, which is where I heard the story.
     One day the Edwards family visited an Indian Reservation.  They were invited to eat with the natives.  Maude, who was part Delaware Indian and knew a little bit about the conditions on the reservation, politely declined on her and the children’s behalf, but Murray accepted a plate and ate.  After he had finished eating, they came upon the dishwashing crew—squaws holding the plates while dogs licked them clean, followed by a quick wipe with the squaws’ skirts.
      In the early forties, Murray and family returned to Kansas, where with help from his parents, he started a cattle herd.  They managed to make a living, raise three kids, and buy their own farm home and still have time to fiddle, rodeo, and do leather work.
     One thing Murray wasn’t good at, something he didn’t like, was mechanic work.  He used horses to do the farm work whenever he could instead of a tractor.  Maude once commented that they spent long summer evenings sitting on the back porch in the shade of the cottonwoods.  The horses could only work so long before needing the rest, so there was leisure time in the evenings.  That went away with the tireless tractor.
      Maude also commented once that all Murray’s gates and barn doors had leather hinges and latches.  Murray didn’t want to mess with metal ones. Leather was for him.
   He was also good with a rope.  Late in his career he was invited to St. Louis to participate in a week-long festival of folk artists.  He took his paintings, his leather works, his fiddle, and his lasso.  A picture in an art magazine caught him with the lasso loop spinning over his cowboy-hatted head, the famous arch in the background.
     One fall when we returned to Kansas after the summer break, we saw Murray on the street.  The girls raced to him and hugged his legs.  He was quite pleased that the girls were attracted to him, but he didn’t know who they were.  When I asked him something about his fiddle playing, he asked me who I played with.  The sad truth dawned on us.
     Murray had been diagnosed with rectal cancer and had had surgery.  The operation saved his life, but he never fully recovered his mental faculties after he came out of the anesthesia. His care became too much for Maude.  For her well-being, the family had Murray moved to the Good Samaritan Home, where he spent the last years of his life. 
     Eventually, Murray knew no one, not even Maude.  Once he asked her, “Do I know you?” 
    “I think you do,” she said.
     “I think you are someone I love,” he said.
     Occasionally, a fellow fiddler would call on Murray in the home.  He could hand Murray a fiddle and get him started on a tune, and Murray would take off and play the tune.  The other fiddler would duet with Murray or switch to guitar and accompany him.  Murray could do that for as long as he was physically able.  
      Murray, Maude and Clifford are all interred in Chardon Cemetery in southern Rawlins County Kansas.  All three are an important part of my life.
     I had four Murray Edwards leather works, gifts of the Goodwife at various times, two belts, a plier pouch (long since worn out) and my guitar strap.  We also have a 6” X 8” leather “picture” of a horse, a gift from Murray or a purchase.






3 comments:

  1. You can add my Tisha belt (with green leaves!) to the list off Murray Edwards leather works. It still "fits" if you find it ok to have your name on one hip or the other.

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    1. I forgot that. I guess you could offset the buckle? Do you remember Murray when he still knew you?

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    2. I do, but all my memories of him are from his house. I don't remember actually seeing him once he moved to the Good Sam.

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