County Legislator Murphy Earns Humanitarian Reputation

John Murphy first began serving in the Rockland County Legislature in 1971.

The 76-year-old Republican from Orangeburg has represented Pearl River for over 40 years and won re-election for the 12th time Nov. 8, 2011, but he does not call that his life's work.

He is also a retired electrical engineer, but that is in his past.

"I became fascinated as a young scholar with how the brain worked and with the role of the brain," Murphy said. "I jsut got hooked adn it became the center of my life, working with people who don't enjoy a healthy brain. Now, since I have retired as an electronic engineer, it is my life's work."

That work is just part of why Murphy was inducted into the Rockland County Human and Civil Rights Hall of Fame in 2010. The organizations that help those with mental disorders he belongs to are:

• President of the Board of Visitors of the Rockland Psychiatric Center.
• President of Camp Venture, which serves intellectually and developmentally disabled.
• President of Loeb House, which provides housing for the mentally ill.
• Co-Producer of the Rockland Autism Symposium, which will be held Oct. 26.
• Member of the New York Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons With Disabilities Surrogate Decison-Making Committee.

Murphy has also begun working more with veterans who have come home dealing with post-traumatic stress and other mental issues. This ties in with his work as President of Homes for Heroes, which serves disabled and displaced veterans.

Murphy's efforts to help others do not stop there. He has become very involved in the battle against cancer, something he attributes in part to his wife Eileen's influence. He helped bring the [#] to Orangetown in 2010, though he and his wife will no longer be the co-chairs in 2012.

He also started [#, #], a website dedicated to keeping in jail the two men who killed 16-year-old Pearl River student Paula Bohovesky in 1980. Murphy's daughter, Jennifer, was a classmate of Bohovesky's.

Efforts such as those have made Murphy a fixture in Rockland County though he grew up in the Bronx. He enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was 21 and settled in Rockland County when his tour of duty was up in 1961. He and Eileen raised three children in the area, two daughters and a son, in that time.

Most of those years have been spent in the county legislature.

"I never wanted to be anything else," Murphy said. "I've turned down opportunities. I never wanted to leave. The county is the health provider and I'm a health guy."

That comes back to the fascination with the mind.

"When you think about it, almost anybody can function if they have a healthy brain," Murphy said. "Anybody can endure with a healthy brain. The people whose lives are constantly at risk are those who do not have a healthy brain.

"Blind people figure it out. Handicapped people figure it out. But if that's not working, you can't live your life."

Autism and Alzheimers are the two brain disorders that garner the most attention, but Murphy believes that a cure is coming relatively soon for Alzheimers. With autism, even the cause remains a mystery.

"There is no explanation for autism," Murphy said. "The best minds in the world are trying to figure out what causes it. They have all kinds of studies. So many I got tired of reading it. Genetics? The environment? What we're ingesting? Nobody knows."

That is why he is involved in the annual autism symposium, which is in its sixth year. That and the rising numbers of people with autism, which at one at one point was showing up in one of ever 110 births.

"We asked around and found out that the early-intervention and pre-K programs were swelling up and special-ed programs were filling up," Murphy said. "It dawned on us that we had a tsunami on our hands."

And as he approached 70 years old, Murphy found one more way to pursue his life's work.