Her Feat Was No Fiction : Library Branch Is Named for Longtime Supporter

When the Graham Branch of the Huntington Beach Library was slated for closure in 1975, Helen Murphy declared that it wasn’t going to happen.

The former elementary school teacher worked without pay for two years, acting as janitor, clerk and volunteer coordinator to keep the library operating.

In a tribute to Murphy, who died of breast cancer last year at age 64, friends, family and patrons gathered Wednesday to celebrate the renaming of the library after her.

“Helen, being Helen, left a joy for me with this honor,” said her mother, Helen Mac Arthur, 91. She came with another daughter and son-in-law from Fountain Hills, Ariz., for the ceremony, which drew about 50 current and former residents and city officials.

The Helen Murphy Branch, a small beige stucco building at 15882 Graham St., was renamed after a letter-writing campaign to let the library director and Huntington Beach City Council members know just how much Murphy contributed to the community.

Maggie Samson, who now lives in Bellevue, Wash., helped launch the campaign, sending letters from her four children, who all remembered “Helen’s library” and the books Murphy would set aside for them.

“Helen would take the little children by the hand and say, ‘I’ve got something new for you to read.’ She’d sit down with them and give me the opportunity to find books I’d been wanting to read. She would personalize it.”

Jennifer Samson, the eldest of the four children, wrote from Seattle to Ron Hayden, director of library services for the city: “For her . . . the most important thing was making a person or a child feel that the book Helen suggested had been written just for them. I can think of no better way of honoring the gift she gave to those who had the wonderful luck to have known her.”

Though the library is the smallest of the city’s four branches, it has the highest circulation, with about 6,000 books checked out every month.

Murphy was well-known for keeping track of her 4,000 regular patrons’ names and tastes in reading material, said Beatrice Hageman, a library volunteer who worked with Murphy for more than 20 years.

“She had everyone pinpointed,” Hageman said. “She knew what everyone liked. When they’d come in and ask, ‘What should I read this week?’ she’d have things set aside for them.”

Hageman also recalled that Murphy befriended the neighborhood’s homeless people, saving paperbacks for them and bringing them cookies during the holidays.

Others who worked with Murphy credit her with making the library the heart of their neighborhood.

“Patrons really believed it was their library,” library director Hayden said. “It was almost as if they were walking into her home and she was lending one of her own books. That feeling is kind of lost with big libraries now.”

After being diagnosed with cancer in 1991, Murphy took off eight months, but then, to Hayden’s surprise, returned to work--and stayed until just three months before her death in October.

“Most people would have packed it up and tried to enjoy what time they have left,” Hayden said. “I was getting ready to fill out her retirement papers. When she came back and continued to work, it typified her strength and determination.”