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Just before Thanksgiving weekend, Tom Murphy strolled into Murf’s Backstreet Tavern in Sag Harbor a little after 4 p.m., as he had done almost every day since selling his eponymous pub three years ago.
Between his first and second cocktail, his daughter recalls, he got up and sauntered over to where a small steel ring hangs from the ceiling by a piece of fishing line. He grabbed the ring with one hand, took a bead on a hook protruding from a nearby post, and swung the ring toward it with the slightest nudge to one side. The ring swooped in from the left and hung on the hook with a loud clang.
Mr. Murphy had plenty of practice with the “ring game” that was Murf’s Backstreet Tavern’s most famous feature over the 30 years he owned it. But that afternoon would be his last go at the hook. Shortly after, the retired New York City policeman and father of four would fall ill from complications following back surgery. Tom Murphy died Saturday morning, January 2. He was 78.
“One of the things he was most proud about was that everybody was comfortable at the bar, no matter their social status or where they came from or what they did for a living,” his daughter Jennifer Sheil said on Tuesday, shortly after Mr. Murphy was buried at Oakland Avenue Cemetery in Sag Harbor. “John F. Kennedy Jr. was there one night, along with the plumbers and construction workers who were normally there. That was the kind of place it was, and he loved that.”
Mr. Murphy, the youngest of four children, was raised in the decidedly less diverse Irish neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy straight out of high school and shortly after World War II had ended. When he got out of the service, he followed his father into the ranks of the New York Police Department. He walked the beat in Harlem for nine years and was then assigned to a motorcycle patrol squad in the Bronx.
The family eventually bought a small summer cottage in Sag Harbor, where Mr. Murphy rekindled his love for the water from his days in the Navy on the sailing grounds outside the harbor. After a collision while chasing a speeder through the Bronx led to an early retirement from the NYPD, Mr. Murphy moved the family to Sag Harbor full time and began picking up odd jobs as a handyman, a carpenter and, in evenings, a bartender.
“He was somebody you could always sit down and talk to,” Ms. Sheil said of her father. “It’s what made him a good bar owner.”
Murf’s Backstreet opened in 1976. The ring hung already from the ceiling when he moved in, a throwback to Sag Harbor’s whaling days. Also in residence, sometimes, was Addie, the ghost of a widowed sailor’s wife that purportedly haunts the rafters of Murf’s.
Mr. Murphy and his convivial wife, Elizabeth, would do the rest to make their new bar one of the legendary watering holes on the East End. Mrs. Murphy worked the bar during the day, Mr. Murphy in the evenings.
“Everybody loved my mom—she was Lizzie to them,” Bonnie Murphy recalled. “She was everybody’s mom. It was a locals place, to play darts, toss the ring. They created that clientele.”
Mr. Murphy became a passionate outdoorsman during his years in Sag Harbor. He frequently sailed to Block Island with friends and employees from his bar. He was also an avid skier who made regular trips to Vermont into his 70s. “He was so excited when he turned 70,” Ms. Sheil recalled, “because it meant he got to ski for free at some slopes.”
His failing back had kept him from the slopes in the recent years but he had sworn earlier this fall that he would return this winter.
Friends around Sag Harbor remembered Mr. Murphy this week as a consummate local business owner and friend.
“He was always at the shop—he was very hands on,” said Vincent Rom, the bartender at the American Hotel not far from Murf’s. “He was such a sweetheart. Every time you asked him for a favor, he was there to do it. He never said no to anything. He was just a classy guy.”
“Murf’s was the place that everybody went, and most of us were asked to leave at some point,” Village Mayor Brian Gilbride joked. “I was asked to leave on more than one occasion in my day, I suppose. When he sold it, I think a lot of people were sorry to see him do it. He will definitely be missed greatly in this village.”
Mr. Murphy is survived by three children, Jennifer Sheil and Bonnie Murphy, both of Sag Harbor, and Thomas Murphy Jr. of Queens, and four grandchildren. He was predeceased by three siblings, his wife of 55 years, Elizabeth, and a daughter, Christine.
A wake was held at the Yardley and Pino funeral home on Monday, and an interment ceremony was held on Tuesday.
on Jan 6, 2010