The team discovered there was nothing to beat one particular latex item, government issue, for keeping sticks of dynamite good and waterproof. It was pure joy for them to figure what the Pentagon must have thought about the statistics piling up in the quartermaster general’s office concerning the kind of war Team Ten was apparently fighting. Bill, as the tallest and huskiest, was the last aboard the waiting pickup boats after the charges had been set—you had to swim fast because the boat couldn’t hang around waiting for you. On one excursion he happened to turn his head. He saw some loose dynamite protectors bobbing up and down in the water after him and nearly drowned laughing.
Their captain was a grandson of Joseph H. Choate, once ambassador to Britain and the godfather of DeWolf Hopper, Bill’s father. Team Ten received some leave to say good-by to their families. I found out later they’d been chosen for the invasion of Japan. Thank heaven, they were in America when the war ended.
A sense of humor is one of the essentials of this life. You can be rich, powerful, famous, but without a bit of fun in your nature, you’re something less than human. I’m not fond of psalm-singing, solemn piety in anybody. But match devotion with kindness and laughter, and you’ve company after my own heart. It’s time to talk about Father Murphy.
He was born in 1892 in Salem, Massachusetts, one of an Irish laborer’s eight children, and he followed an older brother into the priesthood. At one time he was a student together with Fulton Sheen, but one went on to convert the rich, the other the poor. They’ve both exercised their persuasions on me, their faith, I guess, bolstering their hopes for the impossible.
Any danger of conversion by the then Monsignor Sheen was limited to an elevator ride I took with him from the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf Towers down to the entrance level. We’d just been introduced by Clare Boothe Luce, who was a fellow passenger. The monsignor, now bishop, has hypnotic black eyes and a magnetic presence that’s inescapable. I was fascinated by him and his words. Then the elevator reached our destination. “Saved by the basement!” I exclaimed. “Ten more floors and you’d have had me a Catholic.” He roared with laughter.
Father Murphy, bless his heart, has tried longer. I hadn’t known many Catholic priests until I met him at a party in Hollywood, when he was in our town lecturing. I fell under the spell of the soft voice and gentle spirit of this giant-spirited little man. In the Josephite Order of Missionary Priests to the Negro, he served as pastor of the St. Joan of Arc Church in New Orleans, was dean of the department of philosophy and religion at Xavier University there. He did as much for the Negro in that city as anyone alive today.
There was a young man in his parish who had gone as far as he could studying sculpture in New Orleans, though it was plain to Father Murphy that he could become an important sculptor, so funds were raised to send him to New York. Some time later the priest found himself in that city on his way to Rome by way of Paris, and he invited the young sculptor to luncheon. The student had a request to make—would the priest please serve as his eyes and report back to him every possible detail, from the chisel marks to the play of light, of how the statues looked in the Louvre and St. Peter’s?
Father Murphy went straight from the luncheon to the steamship office, where he exchanged his first-class ticket for two tourist berths, with a little spending money left over. He telephoned the young Negro to join him and spent two inspiring weeks in Europe seeing the greatest art treasures of the world through his young companion’s starry eyes. On the voyage home they also shared a cabin.
“Father,” said the young man, “may I ask you a very personal question? I understand that to white people we Negroes have a distinctive odor. What do I smell like exactly?”
Father Murphy’s eyes must have twinkled, as they do constantly. “It’s a little bit like burnt chestnuts.” They both laughed at that. “Now,” said the priest, “we must have a special odor to you. What do I smell like?”