Elizabeth R. Murphy, a retired Mercy Medical Center nurse and World War II veteran, died of an apparent heart attack Tuesday at her South Baltimore home. She was 87.
Elizabeth Rose Horvath was born in South Baltimore, two months after her mother and two brothers emigrated from Hungary. They ran a Clarkson Street grocery store called Zaran's.
She attended St. Mary Star of the Sea Parochial School and was a 1939 graduate of the Institute of Notre Dame, where she remained an active alumna.
In 1942, she earned a diploma at the Mercy Hospital School of Nursing and enlisted in the Army Nursing Corps. She was initially trained to serve in North Africa - and was sent to a dry climate for training in the American West. As the war changed, she was assigned to Southern England, near Salisbury, where she nursed the wounded from the D-Day invasion. She attained the rank of first lieutenant.
While in the service, she met her future husband, John J. Murphy.
After the war she joined the staff at Mercy and was among the first nurses to staff its new recovery room when the hospital built a large addition in the early 1960s. She retired in the 1980s.
Mrs. Murphy attended reunions of her Army nursing unit, and she was active in the Mercy nursing alumni. A Democrat, she followed politics and traveled.
A Mass was offered Friday.
Survivors include a nephew, Paul K. Horvath of Reisterstown; and a niece, Sister Theresa M. Horvath, a member of the Holy Union Sisters, of Midlothian, Va. Her husband died in 2006.
