Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 28, 1994 TAG: 9412280033
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RICK LINDQUIST STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Aside from a new spouse, Murray has plenty of hobbies to keep him out of trouble. He dabbles in glass blowing, stone jewelry and bird-watching, and, in his spare time, he works in a little trail maintenance.
"What spare time? I don't have any spare time," the retired Virginia Tech chemistry professor remarked recently at Warm Hearth Village, where he and Nancy, his wife of two months, live.
He's in good company with his wife, who's in her 60s and also has "a great variety of interests," he said. Just for starters, she raised a family of four sons, used to teach college, and worked in a fire tower in Montana for eight years.
By the way, John Murray shoots a few photographs now and then and does a little gardening, too. And he used to collect stamps.
"I probably have a few hobbies I forgot to mention," he conceded.
In his combination glassblowing and lapidary workshop - tucked away in a small storage room at Warm Hearth's Karr Activity Center - Murray makes holiday ornaments and household decorations in glass, and he cuts, polishes and mounts stones collected on trips around the country. He has one from a trip two years ago to Alaska, where he went with his son and daughter to visit his grandson.
Oh, did he mention his other travels? In 1991, he got a firsthand look at the Amazon rain forest, "with all the critters that inhabit it." He traveled with his nephew, a college professor who directs a research station there. "It took quite a while to get there," Murray recalled. "I think it was about 11 days" by plane, bus and boat, he said.
Last winter, he did Hawaii. Murray's also been to Europe, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, Greece, Canada and, just for fun, all 50 states.
He logged 55 new bird species in the Amazon. He and his wife, who shares his interest, plan a birding trip to Costa Rica in February. He already has "quite a collection" of bird pictures, too.
Murray gets around. Still drives a car.
"Walking is good exercise, too," said Murray, who looks a decade or so younger than his years. He did some mountain climbing in his youth, too, and climbed in the Tetons and Canadian Rockies, including Mount Victoria and other peaks. He once was a member of the Appalachian Mountain Club.
A graduate of Colgate and Johns Hopkins universities, Murray came to the New River Valley in 1942 and taught chemistry at Virginia Tech until he retired in 1971. Glass blowing was an outgrowth of his academic endeavors, dating back to his years at Colgate in the late 1920s. "It's a very useful adjunct to science," he said. "You can fabricate all kinds of things that aren't available in the catalog."
Murray took over Tech's scientific glassblowing class in 1945. "I was the only glass blower in the college for a long time," he said.
When he retired, his colleagues presented him with a burner and an ample supply of glass, so he simply shifted to ornamental glass blowing as a hobby, creating gifts for family and friends.
"You have to practice," he explained. "You have to get the feeling of glass when it's heated - what it will do."
What Murray often does with glass is to craft charming creatures - a dog and puppies, a hummingbird, an ibis (a bird with a long, curved bill), prehistoric animals and even a figurine of the mythical huntress Diana, wearing little else but a bow and arrow. "That was inspired by a statue on one of the buildings in New York," he said of that work, done while he was a graduate student.
For the holidays, Murray shies away from traditional spherical tree ornaments in favor of stars, birds and fish.
"These take a little fussing," he said of a blown-glass dog, back in his shop for "orthopedic surgery" to fix a broken ear.
Typically, he works in boro-silicate glass - more commonly known by its trade name Pyrex. To make the glass malleable, he heats it over a flame generated by propane and pure oxygen that's probably 1800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Sometimes, when he needs an odd piece of glass - say, for the ear on a puppy or a wing for a bird - he recycles broken Pyrex housewares, like the coffee carafe he salvaged from his niece's trash bin.
Other bits and pieces of colored glass go into making eyes and other adornments on his work, which he claims is "boring to watch" because he works slowly.
His glassblowing equipment and supplies take up one wall in the roughly triangular storage room. The lapidary setup occupies the other. Murray made all of the stone-finishing equipment himself, including a stone-slicing - or "slabbing" - saw and finishing and polishing devices he used to make pendants, earrings and the ornamentation on his string tie. "That sort of grew out of my interest in rocks and minerals," he said of his lapidary work.
The workshop space was "part of the bait" to lure him to Warm Hearth Village in 1984.
A native of Long Island, N.Y., Murray has two children and four grandchildren from his marriage of 51 years. His first wife, Ruth Murray, died in 1990.
A few years ago, Murray took over the job as pathfinder for Warm Hearth Village and still maintains the community's six or seven miles of trails, along which he and his new wife first became acquainted during their walks.
"Trails, like the forest, are things that are not permanent," he said. Following last winter's ice storms, he had to reroute some trails that were blocked by fallen trees. "That was a lot of work," said Murray, who admits that using a chain saw is one skill he hasn't gotten around to learning ... yet.
by CNB