Ex-Hostage Plays Lead at Theater Group Party

Thomas Murry has spent many a summer on the backstage crew at the Conejo Players community theater on Moorpark Road in Thousand Oaks.

On Sunday, however, the 58-year-old engineer from Newbury Park was more like a leading man.

“I’m glad to be here,” said Murry, who was one of the Americans held hostage in the recent TWA hijacking. “I’m a little thinner but I feel fine. . . . It’s nice to see people I know,” he said.

Nearly 75 of his friends and neighbors gathered in front of the theater for a party in his honor. For Murry, his wife, Jeanne, and all those friends and neighbors, Sunday’s party was partly a picnic and partly a way of giving thanks. Officially, it was the couple’s first night out since the Northrop Corp. field services engineer returned from the 16-day hostage ordeal in Lebanon and Syria.

Community Theater

Less officially, the party was a function of the community theater group, of which Murry and his wife have long been volunteer members.

And as such, it seemed an appropriate way to return from weeks of relative seclusion, which began when Murry’s plane was hijacked.

“I can’t tell you how good these people were to us,” Jeanne Murry said. “I had people doing my laundry, people cleaning my house, people delivering the groceries. Then when Thomas returned the theater company managed the press conference in our front yard. . . . I really can’t say enough about it. And all those yellow ribbons. We just had tremendous support.”

For the former hostage, the afternoon seemed a joy. Under the careful eye of his wife, who allowed reporters only to watch, he held court with his neighbors, sometimes trading jokes and at other times describing the terrors of the ordeal.

One friend asked humorously when Murry would began endorsing cereal, while another said she had come to see “the movie star.” An elderly woman joked that a hijacking was a “hell of a way to go on a diet.”

Credit Cards Canceled

Murry told of carefully hiding his American Express and Visa cards from the hijackers, only to find out later that his wife had canceled them.

For the most part, Murry seemed to shy away from political discussion, cautioning a friend at one point that “people try to define everything in black and white, while in Lebanon it’s all just gray.”

He also said he wouldn’t mind returning to the backstage life.

“I’m looking forward to that,” he said, while eating a piece of cake. “I’ll talk it all out someday. Right now I’m just happy I’m alive.”