By FREDERICK N. RASMUSSEN|September 24, 2008
Clarke Murphy Jr., a retired lawyer and an adventurer, died Thursday of complications from Alzheimer's disease at Gilchrist Hospice Care. The Ruxton resident was 87.
Mr. Murphy was born in Baltimore and raised in Roland Park. He was a 1938 graduate of Loyola High School and earned a bachelor's degree from the Johns Hopkins University in 1942.
In 1951, he joined the law firm of White, Page and Lentz as a partner. He established a Towson law practice in 1956, which specialized in wills and estate planning. He retired in 2005.
Mr. Murphy and his wife, the former Sarah Booth Whitehead, a photographer whom be married in 1948, both shared an appetite for the outdoors.
Through the years, they climbed the Tetons in Wyoming, went kayaking in Glacier Bay, Alaska, completed a 200-mile round-trip dog sled trip in Alaska on the north side of Mount McKinley, where temperatures fell to minus-60 degrees, watched migrating polar bears in northern Canada and visited the Inuit Indians at Bilot Island.
He was an active communicant of the Roman Catholic Shrine of the Sacred Heart in Mount Washington, where a Mass of Christian burial was offered Monday.
In addition to his wife of 59 years, Mr. Murphy is survived by a son, James Clarke Murphy III of Arbutus; a daughter, Ann Murphy of Bluffton, S.C.; two brothers, John T. Murphy of Charlotte, N.C., and E. Hanlon Murphy of Towson; two sisters, Janes Kearns of Milwaukee and Celestine Hoffman of Ridgewood, N.J.; and nine grandchildren. Another son, George Murphy, died in 2006.
