Michael Murphy

The Livestream Link will be available HERE on the day of the
service and will go live approximately 5 minutes before the event.

Have you ever wrestled with a nun? Michael (M. Justice) Murphy did. We don't mean your modern nun with her sensible tweed suit and her orthopedic Oxfords. We mean old Sister Marie Edwina, with her elaborate silken wimple hiding all of her head except that angelic face - a cross between Ingrid Bergman and Bing Crosby. Yes, Sister Marie Edwina with those floor-length black linen robes cinctured tightly at the waist and set off with a rosary - all fifteen decades.

Michael Murphy was born on November 5, 1933, in a hospital on the Upper East Side of New York City. His mother Catherine, from County Clare, Ireland, died five days later. She had been predeceased by her eight-year-old son, John, whose appendix had ruptured in 1932.

Michael's father, William - gassed in the Great War - had been a teetotaler until John's death, but was a raging alcoholic by 1933. (He died in 1959, on a NYC park bench, blanketed in newspapers.)

In a world gripped by the Great Depression, extended family members were unable to take on an extra mouth to feed, so "Baby Murphy" remained unnamed, and unclaimed, at the hospital for six months. Ultimately, the City of New York appointed a Mrs. Clemens as Michael's foster mother, and she cared for the baby until Michael's maternal aunt claimed him and moved Michael to Jersey City, where he became an altar boy, wrestled with his above-referenced grade-school teacher, and followed the Allies' advances across Europe and the Pacific. In 1942, his uncle, a rabid Giants fan, took Michael to a ball game at the Polo Grounds. Rather than rooting for the home team, Michael found himself drawn to the red birds embroidered across Stan Musial's chest. From that moment, Michael did not go to bed anywhere in the world without knowing what the St. Louis Cardinals had done that day or night. But another sporting event would play an even bigger role in his life. On January 1, 1947, a thirteen-year-old Michael was shoveling snow on the stoop of his Jersey City brownstone when a broadcast of the University of Illinois playing in the Rose Bowl came over the radio. The Illini beat UCLA 54-16, and Michael vowed then and there to attend Illinois. He was accepted into St. Peter's Prep, a prestigious NJ high school run by the Jesuits, where, on day one, he was tasked with learning the "Our Father" in Latin. He studied Greek, St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, and the Classics until he was unceremoniously expelled from The Prep, three months before graduation, for throwing deck chairs from a chartered boat into the Hudson River. After graduating from a neighboring public high school, Michael was again on his own, living in a furnished room, and working as a brakeman on the Delaware Lackawanna Railroad, where his duties included the terrifying task of jumping between moving freight cars. Desperate, hungry and broke, Michael attempted to enlist in the Marines, but was turned away for being underage. When he turned 18, Michael volunteered for the US Army. As he boarded the bus bound for basic training, the young men who had been drafted to fight in the Korean War kissed their mothers and fathers goodbye, but Michael asked simply "When do we eat?" He remained stateside during the war, suffering a ruptured middle ear in a diving-tank accident. In 1954, while stationed in Fort Eustis, Virginia, Michael threw ten pitches to Willie Mays as the latter was leaving base for spring training. (Michael would later take partial credit for the Say Hey Kid winning the National League MVP that year.) After Michael's honorable discharge from the Army, he became a cop on the Washington D.C.'s police department. On his second day on the job, Michael was promoted to detective on the "Sex Squad" because, according to his superior: "You don't look like a cop, and you don't act like a cop". Michael quipped: "At this rate, I'll be the Chief of Police by Friday". Having ruptured his middle ear on the shooting range, Michael jumped on a bus to Champagne-Urbana and enrolled at the University of Illinois - courtesy of the G.I. Bill - where he met co-ed Lynn Stadelman in a German class. Sharing a profound immaturity and good looks, Lynn and Michael scheduled their wedding for a month later. Forebodingly, on the morning of the wedding, Lynn's grandmother died and the reception was cancelled and replaced by a wake. From the marriage's ashes, though, rose their beautiful, smart, and funny children Michael Murphy Jr., in 1957, and Kathryn Murphy, in 1962. At Illinois, Michael Sr. earned an A.B. and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, America's most prestigious academic honor society. (Thirty years later, he would be elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Associateship.) After receiving an Ed.M. from Illinois, Michael enrolled at Harvard University as a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Education. As a teaching assistant, Michael had access to the Harvard Faculty Club where he took his breakfasts beside Nobel laureates, theologians and poets. But, in 1963, Michael's dissertation advisor died by suicide, so Michael drove his '57 Caddy to high school teaching posts in Chicago, and then St. Louis, where he was designated "One of America's Ten Most Unforgettable Teachers" by the General Electric Corporation. Then, in 1965, Michael saw a posting to be a professor in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan. Knowing nothing about the U of S other than he could become tenured without a Ph.D., and having never heard of Saskatchewan, Michael drove his blue '64 Caddy (with a Cardinals front plate) to Saskatoon. While teaching future teachers at the U of S., Michael had another side hustle: obtaining free airline tickets for himself, and his friends in need, from Pan Am, United, and American. The original Catch-Me-if-You-Can protagonist, Michael soon learned that he could exchange the free tickets for cash. And exchange them he did. (For a NYC grifter, the con was just too easy to pass up.) Having no MLB team to watch, Michael began attending women's fastball games, where he witnessed the twin-sister sensation Anne and Linda Hopkins tear up the local diamonds. In 1967, Michael was surprised to see Linda in one of his Education classes. (Linda was fourteen years younger, had grown up on a farm in the Surbiton Valley, and was, to say the least, naïve.) Michael's opening line was: "Why don't you hit so well as your sister?" Linda was swept off her feet, and the romantic professor-student relationship commenced. (It was the '60s.) When Michael and Linda arrived at the family farm shortly thereafter in a yellow '67 Caddy, Linda announced (privately) to her parents Geoff and Betty Hopkins: "This is the man I'm going to marry." As Michael was divorced, Catholic, and American, Geoff and Betty immediately offered to send Linda to study in France, alone. Linda rebuffed the offer. Then, when Michael was en route to Rio de Janeiro on Pan Am for a weekend of beach volleyball, the FBI arrested him in Detroit on charges of mail fraud. Prone to impulsivity, Michael made the best decision of his life, and used one of his phone calls from jail to ask: "Linda, will you marry me?" Linda, who recalls being extremely happy, said "Yes." Linda and Michael were married in 1969. At the wedding were Michael's good friends, and fellow professors, Gary Irvine and Harry Dhand, with whom Michael shared laughs until their deaths. In 1970, Michael and Linda had Christopher Robin, who was jaundiced, and received an emergency Catholic baptism. Lara followed in 1972 after Linda drove herself to the hospital because she could not wake Michael up. (It was the '70s.) While Michael was visiting Auschwitz, Kathleen arrived in 1975. By 1976, Michael was the self-appointed Commissioner of Lineball (a variation of baseball) and the Father of Home Schooling in Saskatchewan. His classes at the U of S revolved around his desire to shut down the schools, a sentiment that did not land well with most of his College of Education colleagues. In 1976, Michael put his money where his mouth was and experimented with his own child, making Christopher Robin Saskatchewan's first child to be deliberately "Unschooled". Lara and Kathleen, too, were exempt from the "tyranny of compulsory education". Indeed, the three children were essentially left to their own devices and became instruments in their own Unschooling experiment. Ultimately, hundreds of Michael's mentees and students homeschooled their own children, resulting in the exponential growth of the homeschooling movement.

Michael often said that life's only worthwhile pursuits were to be either the son of a rich man, or a university professor. He cherished the latter, not simply because he was provided with a captive audience, but because it allowed him to trumpet the world's beauty. Michael believed that a "man's work is nothing but the long journey to recover, through the detours of art, the two or three great and simple images that first gained access to his heart." Each time Michael stepped into a classroom, he tried to gain access to his students' hearts. In March 1996, Michael received the Students' Union Teaching Excellence Award "on behalf of grateful students", recognizing "both exceptional teaching skills and distinguished commitment to excellence in education". However, on Thanksgiving Day, the same year, Michael-still profoundly immature and impetuous-was caught on camera writing a four-letter word on a colleague's door. He was suspended from his beloved teaching duties the same day, and ultimately did not preside over another class. Murphy v. the U of S played out in the headlines of the local media, but his being kept out of the classroom caused him significant suffering. It was not until Lara and Dean Wiebe had baby Anna in 2001 that Michael became truly happy again. To his delight, Lara and Dean followed up with Ella and Owen.

Michael's lifelong devotion to the Virgin Mary resulted in, according to him, at least two miracles-each with an assist from Jon Witt. First, on April 21, 2009, Michael's aorta ruptured, and although he had only a 5% chance of surviving, he pulled through. This miracle allowed him to meet eight additional grandchildren: Dean and Lara's Noah; Christopher and Lori Budd's Loomis, Leven, Satchel and Sonny; and Kathleen and Ken Morris' Samuel, McCoy, and Poppy. Then, on August 4, 2020, twenty-one of the people closest to Michael, including all eleven of his grandchildren, were sleeping on a houseboat when it caught fire in the middle of the night. Although the houseboat was completely engulfed in flames within two minutes, everybody made it off the boat alive. These events, together with the knowledge that he would be reunited with his mother upon his death, gave Michael peace. He fought the good fight; he finished the race; and kept the faith.

Michael knew that God loved a scoundrel, and all he wanted was to be the scoundrel God loved the most. So, before bed each night, Michael would kiss his rosary, pray to the Blessed Mother and thank God for the opportunities that he was given, the people who loved him, and the people whom he loved.

Michael Murphy died in his sleep, at home, on December 9, 2025, presumably from a ruptured artery. Although he had always hoped that his last words would be "But, perhaps I've said too much", he actually told Lara: "If this aneurism kills me, at least I will have beaten cancer."

Funeral details:

Monday, December 22, 11 a.m.

St. Philip Neri Parish, 1902 Munroe Avenue S, Saskatoon, SK

For those not able to attend in person, a livestream will start at 11 a.m.