BELLEVUE – If he wasn’t Murphy in the Morning on WIXX-FM for the past 32 years, he might have been Jim Murphy, store manager at your local Menards.
“Murphy,” as he’s best known, worked part time at the home improvement store chain early in his life and loved it, but it was “a fluky start” in radio that sent him down a career path as one of northeastern Wisconsin’s most enduring and endearing on-air personalities.
Listeners have been waking up with him for generations — a familiar voice and steady presence who brings levity, laughter and no-nonsense next-door neighbor relatability to whatever comes up from 5 to 9 a.m. each weekday. People who were in middle school or high school when he first started at Green Bay’s WIXX in 1991 are now grandparents, and they’re still tuning in.
“We hear a lot of ‘I listened to him on the bus,’” said Katie Schurk, who has co-hosted the “Murphy in the Morning” show for 20 years. Co-host Nick Vitrano has been with them for the last 12.
Yet, getting Murphy, who will retire on Nov. 28, to acknowledge that he and the show that carries his name are a bona fide local institution is not an easy ask, at least not the part where he readily takes credit for any of it.
“A lot of my success is due to the people I’ve worked with. If it was just boring ol’ me, I don’t know if it would’ve made it 32 years, but luckily, I’ve had great partners along the way,” he said.
Before Schurk and Vitrano, he shared the studio with such well-known media types as Kathie Hall, John Maino, Tammy Elliott and Marti Spittell, among others. He also cites the staying power of WIXX, a Top 40 powerhouse that dates back to 1977. It’s that rare generational station that hooks everyone from kids to people in their 80s with its on-air personalities, community presence and the latest Jelly Roll hot mix.
“People just grew up with the radio station and they’ve never left their entire lives,” Murphy said, “and I’ve been a part of that for 32 years, which is a pretty big chunk of change.”
It is indeed, particularly since a career in radio was never the plan.
Just what was the plan?
“I don’t know that I had a plan,” he says.
He started at WIXX at 18 and went full time in Michigan’s U.P.
As a kid growing up in Howard-Suamico, Murphy would scan the dial at night and pick up AM stations from Boston, Denver or Des Moines, Iowa, all of which came in clear as a bell back then. By the time he was attending Bay Port High School, he was listening to WIXX, which is where that “fluky start” comes in.
The brother of his girlfriend back then, Bill LuMaye, was the station’s program director. He was looking for part-time help on the weekends. Murphy signed on at age 18.
“It was basically pushing buttons and putting Casey Kasem on the air Saturday nights. You literally dropped the needle, so somebody had to be here to do that. It wasn’t like today where everything is automated.”
Those six hours each weekend became the highlight of his week. He began practicing fake commercials in hopes maybe he could graduate to doing the weather one day. A year and a half later, he took a part-time job on Saturday and Sunday nights at a station in Two Rivers. His first full-time job came a year or two later at Ishpeming/Marquette station Q107 (WMQT-FM) in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, followed by career stops of a couple of years each in Oshkosh and New Orleans.
Then … a return to WIXX, where he, like so many other longtime listeners, never left.
Leading Packers Super Bowl parade and jumping out of a plane
When he says “it’s a great job to have” — getting paid to have fun, laugh and play music — he couldn’t have imagined all the opportunities and friendships the morning slot would bring his way. Even now, as he’s been going through old photos and interviews, it’s hard to believe the breadth of all he’s done, from serious to silly.
For 28 years, he was down on the sidelines of Lambeau Field doing pregame contests for Green Bay Packers games. He led the victory parade through the city after the Packers won Super Bowl XXXI in 1997.
He’s become friends with Packers coaches and players through WIXX’s partnership with the team, including former head coach Mike McCarthy, who called into “Murphy in the Morning” on Thursdays for 13 seasons to talk about family and life outside football.
He gave listeners a glimpse into the personalities of Packers players on “Breakfast With the Boys” and “1 on 1 With the Boys,” shows that allowed the studio audience to meet the men and grab a photo.
Who could forget the time he parachuted out of a plane from more than 10,000 feet with De Pere Mayor Nancy Nusbaum in 1994, a Leap of Faith stunt to kick off Celebrate De Pere? He hit his mark; Nusbaum didn’t. He was rewarded with a limo ride during the Kiwanis Memorial Day Parade. She had to clean up after the horses.
He got to meet and introduce retired U.S. Army Gen. and future Secretary of State Colin Powell at Fox Cities Stadium in 1999. He went to bat against Michael Bolton’s traveling softball team, Bolton’s Bombers, for the George Teague Celebrity Softball Challenge.
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Ahead of a 1996 Packers-San Francisco 49ers playoff game, he flew out to San Francisco to swap radio studios with morning show personalities, Elvis and J.V. In 2000, when his co-host and local TV anchor, Tammy Elliott, won a national “Women of Radio Co-host Week” contest to guest host “Live with Regis” with Regis Philbin, he did his show from the ABC studios in New York City.
He turned his “Murphy Tapes” cassettes into a holiday tradition in the ’90s. The annual best-of compilation from a year’s worth of show interviews and humor sold out at local Burger Kings for $4 a pop as a fundraiser for the WIXX Christmas Wish Fund.
In between, he has emceed oodles of local events, from bridal fashion shows and banquets to fundraisers and concerts. All those appearances and the proliferation of social media in the last decade means he sometimes gets recognized in public, but not as much as you might think. It’s still fairly easy for him to go unnoticed, and he’s just fine with that. He’s always been more comfortable flying under the radar than being the center of attention.
“If I walk into a place, you’re never going to know I’m there, unless there’s a reason you’re supposed to know I’m there,” he said.
Loyal, unflappable and patient … but so many water bottles
Even for Vitrano and Schurk, who consider him a colleague, friend, mentor and family, trying to explain what it is that makes Murphy so good at what he does can feel like an impossible feat. It starts with his professionalism, fierce loyalty to those closest to him, the sense of security he brings to the show and his unflappable nature.
That he also happens to be a neat freak with an office with enough half-full bottles of water and Powerade to hydrate a small country, well, that’s just a fun insiders-only quirk that makes for easy ribbing from his co-hosts.
“We always describe it, if you have to bury a body, you call Murphy in the Morning,” Vitrano said.
“He is the vault. He is the keeper of secrets. He knows more than anybody and he will never (tell),” Schurk said.
“He’s a hard person to crack, but once you’re in, you’re in. It’s kind of the fraternity you want to be in,” said Schurk, who credits her career to him and has never been on the air without him. “He has a soft spot. When you’re in his circle, he will go to the ends of the earth for you, but he doesn’t do it where you know. It’s very hard to describe.”
She has had to remind herself not to ask him to reconsider retirement and stay, because she thinks he might. She can practically hear him say, “OK, if that’s what you need.” Yep, he’s that guy.
“He is very much a man of virtue and principle but patient, and will allow virtue and principle to win,” Vitrano said. “He is patient almost to a fault.”
“Oh, it’s annoying. ‘Do something, Murphy!’” Schurk said. “I say that with love.”
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Because he’s such a brilliant maestro of the moment on the show, getting him to gut laugh or lose it on-air has long been a goal for Schurk and Vitrano. They haven’t pulled it off often, but they do recall a time when Schurk talked for days on the air and off about a mysterious squeaking noise in the wall of her home. The drama took over the call-in and texting lines morning after morning, as listeners speculated on what it could be.
It went on for days until finally one morning an exasperated Murphy looked at her and said, “You know what I would do? I would do nothing and just keep coming in here every day and talking about it.”
“He lost it! We got him. He snapped,” Vitrano said. “It was such a great moment you couldn’t help but smile and laugh.”
They hope to surprise him during these final days behind the mic with all kinds of special moments in the works, including guests from the past.
“If we can focus on those, I don’t have to focus on saying goodbye,” Schurk said.
Retirement will come with golf and no more 3 a.m. wake-ups
Murphy knows a few things about what his retirement will look like, beginning with a lot of golf and maybe even a stint on a lawn mower at a course somewhere down the road. He looks forward to traveling with his wife and eventually sleeping in, which is a relative term when you’re on-air moniker has been Murphy in the Morning since 1983.
He’s up at 3 a.m. Monday through Friday and in the studio by 4 a.m., the same time Vitrano arrives. (“Katie strolls in at 5,” he points out.) He doubts he’ll ever be a late sleeper, but walking the dog at 6 a.m. sounds pretty nice.
Schurk and Vitrano still expect their phones to vibrate in unison when they’re on the air — a sure sign that a vacationing Murphy was listening to the show.
“I am incredibly confident we are going to be receiving texts, probably daily, with constructive criticism,” Schurk said.
They’ll continue to anchor the mornings with a third person who has yet to be named by Midwest Communications, which owns WIXX. It’s not as simple as finding someone to fill his seat.
“Can’t do it,” Schurk said “Have to find a whole new seat to fill. He’s not being replaced. He’s irreplaceable.”
When Murphy announced his retirement on the air on Oct. 3, there was a tidal wave of texts and Facebook comments from listeners, all with a similar sentiment of how much he’ll be missed but how happy they are for him.
“There was not a negative reaction from a single person. It was remarkable to watch,” Vitrano said. “He is loved universally. Everyone has an opinion one way or the other about everyone, except Murphy. They all love him.”
Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or[email protected]. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter)n@KendraMeinert.