Before freeways replaced oranges, a friendship began
It is possible, of course, for friendships to be eternal. Who can say whether it’s chemistry or karma or some magic combination of the two, but when you have one, you know it. Doesn’t have to be defined or explained, it’s just something belonging to you and someone else that can’t be sold or traded away.
Allen Murray is talking about one of the best kinds, because it started in his boyhood. Now 64, Murray is recalling an Orange County where all the merchants on a block knew one another, a place with orange groves but no freeways. Murray’s dad owned a soft-drink bottling plant in Orange, and Mac MacPherson had a doughnut shop a block or so away.
Murray thinks it was in the early 1950s when MacPherson shut down his doughnut shop and signed on to drive a bottling truck for Murray’s dad. The families already knew each other, but whatever work relationship ensued between the men had nothing on the budding friendship between young Allen and Mac’s son, Malcolm, a year older than Allen.
The Murrays lived among the orange groves in what is now Villa Park, and the MacPhersons in Garden Grove. “I’d spend the weekend with his family, and he’d come over with us for weekends,” Murray says.
Murray remembers what an amazing guy Mac MacPherson was. When he’d join Malcolm’s family for dinner, the drill was the same: the meal, followed by doing dishes, followed by at least one hour in which everyone in the household (including young Allen) would read quietly from a literary classic. Then, each would discuss what he or she was reading with the group.
When Malcolm hung out at the Murrays’, he’d listen to classical music on the family’s Magnavox. Murray thinks he was 8 or 9 when his parents decided it was time for his first airplane ride. Because it was Malcolm’s turn to visit, he joined the Murrays on a cruise to Catalina and a flight home aboard United Air Lines.
Of such capers was the friendship built.
Then one morning in 1955, the phone rang in the Murray household and his father screamed out. Malcolm and his parents had been riding in their Nash Rambler the night before when someone ran a red light and crashed into the driver’s side. Both of Malcolm’s parents were killed. Malcolm, 11, survived, but his left leg sustained multiple breaks.
When he was well enough to travel, he joined his two sisters in Connecticut, where they were raised by an aunt and uncle. Murray doesn’t remember their goodbyes, but he remembers the exact street address in Connecticut where he’d write Malcolm in the following months.
Separated by a continent, the boys lost touch. They didn’t see each other again until the 1960s: MacPherson visited Murray, who was attending USC. Murray went on to become a biochemist; MacPherson a journalist with Newsweek and then an author.
The ‘60s turned into the ‘70s and the ‘80s and the ‘90s and then a new century.
Last year, caught up in a phase of personal reminiscence about days of yore in Orange, Murray told a friend about his old pal Malcolm. Freshly motivated, Murray went online and found that MacPherson lived in Virginia, and vowed to call. He got busy and put it off. Remarkably on the same wavelength, Malcolm wrote soon after to the USC alumni office and asked for help in tracking down his old friend Allen Murray.
Finally, last September, the boyhood chums hooked up. As they made plans to reunite, they had several lengthy phone conversations, their first chats in more than 40 years.
“It was like picking up a conversation like we had back in the ‘50s,” Murray says. “It was like the last time we’d spoken had been yesterday. He was exactly the same person he was back then, and so was I.”
The boys who had become men talked of a quickie reunion in November when MacPherson’s wife was coming out to Palm Springs. As the day neared, however, Malcolm wrote to say he had a better idea: He’d wait until January of this year so he and his wife could spend a week and not be rushed.
The MacPhersons planned to arrive in California tomorrow, on the 28th.
Nine days ago, Murray got an e-mail from MacPherson’s wife, Charlie. She told him that Malcolm had suffered a heart attack at a party the night before and died.
After some 40 years, the two boyhood chums missed their reunion by 11 days. “It just devastated me,” Murray says. “For me, I feel robbed, obviously.”
He couldn’t help but lament that they’d scuttled the earlier meeting. They’d pledged in their conversations that they’d stay in better touch.
When the time is right, Murray says, he wants to meet Malcolm’s widow and two children.
I asked why. After all, he hadn’t seen Malcolm in more than 40 years and had never met his wife.
“It’s a connection to him,” Murray says. “If I’ve been deprived of the opportunity to get together again with him -- they were married for 20 years -- at least this will give me the opportunity to get insights into the last 20 years of his life.”
I hope Murray has made peace with things, accepting what is instead of what could have been. As magical as lifelong friendships are -- even those that survive only in the heart and mind -- so too are the inexplicable workings of the fates.
Of one thing he has no doubt: Their connection survived the decades.
The proof was in MacPherson’s own words in an e-mail in September:
“I have no one from that time, except for you,” he wrote. “That time was terribly important to me. Your mother was important to me, too, encouraging, kind, smart -- hers was a voice from outside my family that I respected and admired and when she paid me an offhand compliment, I glowed with pleasure.”
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