Polly Woollcott Murphy died on Sunday, Nov. 15 with her family around her at her home in West Tisbury. She was 86.
Born in 1923, she was the youngest of the four daughters of William W. and Marie B. Woollcott of Catonsville, Md. A longtime Island resident, Polly grew up summering at her grandfather’s house on West Chop along with her immediate and extended family.
She attended the Bryn Mawr School and later the Friends School in Baltimore before entering Swarthmore College. At Baltimore Friends she met her future husband Stanley Murphy. They were married in 1945 at an Army base in Little Rock, Ark.; her sister Barbara was maid of honor. At the conclusion of the war, Stan enrolled in the Art Students League in New York city, and the couple lived in a cold-water walk-up apartment in Little Italy, which they shared with Stan’s large stone lithographic printing press.
With one young child they moved to West Tisbury in 1948 where Stan took on a number of jobs while he pursued his artistic career. The family grew to include four children: Chris, Laura, Kitty and David. Stan painted Island scenes and Islanders for over 50 years until his death in 2003.
A writer from an early age, Polly’s grammar school poetry appeared in the pages of The New Yorker magazine, and in1940 at the age of 17 she began working as a cub reporter for the Vineyard Gazette under the watchful eyes of Henry and Betty Hough. As an adult she wrote the Gazette column covering the news of Chilmark, and later West Tisbury, along with contributing feature stories on a variety of topics. Her West Tisbury column always began with an observation of nature that captured the essence of the Vineyard outdoors from the previous week, before the listings of the comings and goings of West Tisbury.
“I loved doing the interviews but perhaps I loved even more Tuesdays and Fridays when the Gazette came out and I was released from my typewriter to help insert and wrap the papers as they came off the press,” she wrote in a 1984 recollection in the Gazette about her first summer as an intern. “It was nice, cheerful, mindless work that I suppose now I would refer to as therapuetic, and there was a cameraderie in the back room that was also very warming.
“When the loud press — the thunderer — was turned off toward the end of the morning, the sudden silence was deafening . . .”
Another Polly — the late Polly Hill after whom the West Tisbury Arboretum is named — once commented on the quality of Mrs. Murphy’s column. “She keeps me oriented in the way I care about the Vineyard . . . I can picture and almost smell the air of North Tisbury,” she wrote in a letter to the editor of the Gazette in 1983.
Polly Murphy managed the Stanley Murphy Gallery on South Road in Chilmark for many summers, greeting every visitor, especially welcoming the barefoot and shirtless. Through the gallery and her efforts, patrons became friends and friends became patrons. From her garden, Polly created stunningly beautiful flower arrangements, some of which were immortalized in paintings by her husband.
Active in the NAACP for many years, she was recently honored on a plaque that was hung at the old West Tisbury Free Public Library on the African American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard for her involvement with four other Vineyard women in the 1963 North Carolina civil rights mission to register voters.
“This was the early sixties and civil rights were very much on our minds,” she told Linsey Lee, oral historian for the Martha’s Vineyard Museum and author of Vineyard Voices and More Vineyard Voices. “Things you saw on television, things you read; people were getting more and more aware of the terrible injustices — that had been there right along certainly . . . Well, to us it just seemed very logical; sort of putting our money where our mouth was, you know. And here we weren’t living with — not to say there wasn’t discrimination here, because there was and is, but not the kind of frightening thing there was in the South, you know.”
She was also an inaugural member of the West Tisbury conservation commission.
Known for her superb cooking, Polly frequently incorporated fresh fish or fowl into the evening meal, usually accompanied by a sauce, something from her garden and her homemade bread. She made French bread weekly for over 45 years, and also put up her own pickles, relish, beach plum jam and wild grape jellies.
A lover of dogs, she became a breeder of golden retrievers and later had a series of standard poodles.
Her passions included: her family, civil rights, politics, gardening, the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, cooking, flower arrangement, reading, writing, dogs, walking and the beach. The large oval table in her kitchen was a gathering point for family and friends where she served pots of tea every late afternoon.
What follows is an excerpt from one of her West Tisbury columns in November 1976:
We are now well launched into November, and the second and sadder half of autumn. The days have turned warmer again this week, but the leaves are mostly gone from the trees. Even the tenacious oaks are bare and Brandy Brow has wall-to-wall carpeting of bright yellow maple leaves. Pumpkins and Indian corn adorn the doorsteps where lately geraniums reigned. Great flocks of starlings sweep around the sky in changing fluid clouds or suddenly settle into the treetops in a loud cacophony of metallic chatter which is perhaps a commentary on the season just passed or perhaps a raucous greeting to the coming winter.
She is survived by her sister Nancy Smith of West Tisbury; two sons, Chris Murphy and his wife Barbara of Chilmark, and David and his wife Gail of Duxbury; two daughters, Laura and Kitty Murphy, both of West Tisbury; grandchildren Hope MacLeod and her husband Chris and Mary Boyd and her husband Jonathan, all of Chilmark, Clarissa Murphy of West Tisbury and John Murphy of Duxbury; and three great-grandchildren, Finnegan and Linden MacLeod and Emily Boyd.
A memorial service will be held on Sunday, Nov. 22 at 2 p.m. at the New Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury.
In lieu of flowers contributions may be made to the West Tisbury Free Public Library, 1042 State Road, Vineyard Haven MA 02568.
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