Friends celebrate memories of writer Donald M. Murray

DURHAM, N.H. -- "Only connect," a phrase from an E.M. Forster novel, was one of many quotations Donald M. Murray used to coax the writer within from his students, and himself.

"He spun a web that binds us together irrevocably now in grief," said Chip Scanlan, who teaches writing at the Poynter Institute and spoke yesterday at a memorial service for Murray on the University of New Hampshire campus, where he had been professor emeritus.

Teacher, author, newspaper columnist, Murray was on the cusp of launching a website for his writing acolytes when he died, at 82, on Dec. 30.

A Pulitzer Prize-winner for editorials he wrote in his late 20s, he was as revered as a no-nonsense writing instructor as he was for the columns he published in the Globe the past 20 years.

In Johnson Theatre yesterday, about 600 people watched a montage of photos showing Murray as a child, a man, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a writer.

"I thought, 'This guy writes like water going downhill,' " said Don Graves, a retired UNH professor, of his first encounters with Murray's prose.

The eight speakers recalled a man who was by turns sensitive and cheerfully profane, crafting sentences that helped readers through grief, and whooping it up at the university's hockey games.

"I found him a profoundly human, human being," said Hans Heilbronner, a retired UNH professor.

"Unlike most of us, he had the courage to be his own master," he added.

Murray did not stand on ceremony in person or at the keyboard.

Tom Romano, a former student who now teaches at Miami University in Ohio, said a note Murray wrote inviting him to dinner instructed him to "dress sloppy -- you saw my suit, I believe."

"Don taught us when the muse would visit -- every time you pick up a pen," Scanlan said, and that Murray always applied a cardinal rule of writing, which was "applying your behind to a chair."

Putting memory to good use was something dear to Murray. In his Globe column "Over 60," later renamed "Now and Then," he sustained the presence of his wife, Minnie Mae, who died in 2005.

"He taught me to take note and remember," his daughter Hannah Starobin said in a remembrance read by her husband, Michael. Michael Starobin, a Tony Award-winning orchestrator and arranger, also wrote a musical tribute that he performed with his two sons -- Murray's grandsons.

"Remembering may be a celebration or it may be a dagger in the heart," Murray wrote, in a passage from one of his books quoted by his daughter, "but it is better, far better, than forgetting."

"I loved you, Don," Scanlan said. "And for the rest of my life, dear friend, I will miss you."