Let's begin with Robert Cushman Murphy. He was a very tall, handsome man, except his eyes were a little bit too small, who came from a rather lowly background. In fact, those who didn't like him would say he's the son of a Long Island cracker. And… however, he had married a girl from one of the upper class families who was very class conscious and so Murphy had to play the same game and he talked a great deal to ladies’ clubs and… he was always very conscious of… of society and so on. And there was a very funny thing, the… it's a little anecdote that doesn't really belong here, but I can't… help myself, I must tell it now. There is an… an establishment on Long Island, was at least at that time, the Long Island Hunt, where they were actually, like in Britain, hunting foxes with… with these dogs and… and chasing them on… on horses. And the Master of the Hunt, a Mr Dreyer, was actually a cousin of my wife, and so when his daughter Dorothy married we were invited to be at the wedding reception. And up to that time Murphy and his wife were… we were newly married, this was about two months after our marriage, Murphy and his wife had completely ignored us, but in the wedding reception we were about five or eight couples ahead of the Murphys and so when we reached Mrs Dreyer, the mother of the bride, she threw her arms around my wife and kissed her on the cheeks and… and treated her like a member of the family, which she was. And then we moved on the line, and then the Murphys passed by and the Murphys after that made a beeline for us and invited us for dinner, because it showed that we were now socially acceptable. So Murphy had a beautiful sense of English. He wrote beautiful things and he could give spellbinding speeches, he should have been a politician, he would have gone a long way; he was referred to as ‘the silver tongue of Brooklyn’ before he came to the American Museum [of Natural History]. He had only one disadvantage, he was also quite bright: he was very lazy. It was very hard to make him work and both [Frank] Chapman and eventually Sanford had great trouble getting manuscripts out of Murphy. Well, I shall not follow that line, but Murphy helped me when I… had completed my first papers I gave the manuscript… because Chapman was still in… in Panama, I gave my manuscripts to Murphy and he gave me some very helpful hints as to sentence structure and the use of certain words. So I'm… I'm always grateful to him for that.
