Joe Murray, 'country journalist' who led 13,000-circulation Lufkin Daily News to a Pulitzer Prize in 1977, dies at 82

Joe Murray

Joe Murray, who led a 13,000-circulation daily to a Pulitzer Prize and became a globetrotting columnist but said he only wanted to be remembered as a "country journalist," died Sunday. He was 82.

Murray was editor of the Lufkin Daily News in east Texas when he and young reporter Ken Herman (later a storied political reporter) won the 1977 Pulitzer gold medal for public service "for an obituary of a local man who died in Marine training camp, which grew into an investigation of that death and a fundamental reform in the recruiting and training practices of the United States Marine Corps," the Pulitzer site says. The prize committee said "A small newspaper with limited resources chose not to settle for the official explanation," according to Stacy Fasion's story in the LDN.

"The stories focused on irregularities in tactics used by some Marine recruiters and the Corps training programs as well as special 'motivation' platoons for difficult recruits," Fasion writes. Marine Lynn "Bubba" McClure "was not mentally qualified to join the Marine Corps and had volunteered to enter a state hospital. The stories also revealed that recruiters failed to check with police officers in Lufkin, and McClure had been coached so he could pass his second Marine exam. With help from then-U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson, the stories led to congressional hearings and reforms in Marine Corps recruiting and training. The Marine Corps reprimanded some of the officers involved and court-martialed non-commissioned officers."

"The Associated Press picked up the investigation, and the articles began to appear nationally. These led to a presidential inquiry and a congressional investigation and finally to reforms within the Marine Corps of its recruiting practices," The New York Times reported in 1977. The Pulitzer Board got in touch with Mr. Murray and asked him to submit the articles for a prize." Murray got the additional job of publisher in 1978, "was named special writer for Cox Newspapers [then the paper's owner] in 1989 and began traveling the world, filing columns that ran in newspapers across the country," Faison recounts. "And when he wasn’t on the road, he stayed home and wrote about his neighbors, continuing his column until his retirement in 2000."

In another Faison story, Herman reflects on how Murray steered his career, introduced him to the woman who would become his wife, and committed journalism in a town of 25,000 (now 35,000) when one of his distant cousins, a county commissioner, was indicted on corruption charges: “Herman said he believed it was Joe’s mother who called him and said, 'You don't have to make big deal of that in the newspaper, do you?' And of course, it was very a big story. So he said, ‘No, no, Mom, we won’t make it a big story.’ The next day, Herman said the story was ‘splashed all over the front page with a big headline.’ And Joe called his mother and said, ‘Well, I took your advice, and we were going to make it even bigger. But on your advice, we didn’t make it that big.’ But we couldn’t have played it any bigger.”