PD reporter Austin Murphy: Grateful to be back in journalism after delivering packages for Amazon

I am one of eight children from an Irish-Catholic family. My mother, the saintly Patricia Murphy, bore seven of us in eight years. Amy the “Oops” baby arrived four years later and took ruthless advantage during her high school years of the exhaustion of our parents.

Once a week, we sat for a formal dinner. Napkins went in laps. Grace was recited, often by my father, who, if he was feeling jocund, or impatient, might simply declaim: “Good bread, good meat, good God, let’s eat.”

The other six evenings of the week my parents enjoyed “cocktail hour” with Walter Cronkite in the den while their offspring supped at a picnic table in the kitchen, where the ambiance evoked a penitentiary chow hall.

We bolted our food because we were very seldom not hungry, and because those who ate fastest were likeliest to get seconds. This explains, in part, why I’ve been a bit of a failure in Northern California, cradle of the slow food movement. It’s taken me decades to master my first instinct: to eat fast.

Another byproduct of growing up in a big family: You learn to tell a story — and tell it quickly, because you knew some sibling was ready to interrupt with their own anecdote.

That’s a roundabout way of explaining how I ended up in journalism. I’ve been telling stories for a living since 1983, when I graduated from Colgate University in central New York — no, it has nothing to do with the toothpaste, and we are unamused by your jokes — then caught on as a sports writer at the Bucks County Courier Times, outside of Philadelphia.

Six months later, with high school football season over and assignments drying up, I moved into my parents’ unfinished basement in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. There, in my cinder block lair, I set up an office, circling want ads, composing cover letters to newspaper editors. During that dispiriting interlude of unemployment, I wrote an allegedly humorous essay and sent it off to Sports Illustrated. Two months had passed, and I’d forgotten about that essay, when a letter arrived from the magazine.

This envelope felt different — had more heft than the form rejections I’d been collecting from across the republic. SI’s editors had, in fact, been amused by my essay, and were offering $1,000 for it. A month later, I was hired full time. I’d just turned 23.

I won’t go into much detail on my 33 years at the magazine, other than to say that it was a hell of a run, I wrote a lot of cover stories, and yes, we did party with the swimsuit models.

Downsized in 2017, I took some big swings, in the quest to reinvent myself. I embedded with a high school football team on the North Shore of Oahu, hoping to write and produce a television series on football in Hawaii, like Friday Night Lights with more hair and vowels.

When that didn’t pan out, I turned to Option B: I would be a political speechwriter. How tough could that be?

Quite difficult, it turned out.

And so, to fill the gaps between freelance writing assignments, I replied in October 2018 to an Indeed.com posting for an Amazon delivery driver. When I sat down with a supervisor named George in the “break room” of the vast Amazon warehouse in the Bay Area city of Richmond, it was my second job interview in 34 years.

Punching the clock in the service of Jeff Bezos felt strange for a week or two. Seeing the curved Amazon arrow on my sleeve summoned a sense of dislocation, the feeling of having drifted, by some cosmic accident, into the existence of a man who bore me a close resemblance but was not leading my charmed life.

Pretty soon, I got the hang of it. Not only did I not dread going to the warehouse each morning, I looked forward to embarking on a different adventure every day.

Delivering turned out to be my deliverance — my path back to professional writing. On a dreary, drizzly February afternoon in 2019, I’d just schlepped an XL-box up a long flight of stairs to a front door in the Berkeley Hills when I noticed I had an email from Ted Appel, then-managing editor of The Press Democrat.

Two months earlier, I’d written about my Amazon experience for the Atlantic. After reading that essay, Ted had invited me up to Santa Rosa for an interview. On this day, he was calling to offer me a job.

We learn how much we love something when it’s taken away. That’s why my four years at this newspaper have been the most meaningful of my career. I approach the job with a level of appreciation and gratitude that might have been missing when I was younger.

It’s been invigorating, defibrillating, to leave the Toy Department and write about everything but sports, whether it’s shining a light on shady builders or elevating local heroes. It’s also been heart-wrenching and difficult, chronicling the stories of those whose lives have been upended by wildfires and a pandemic.

Yes, we’re supposed to hold our subjects at a certain remove, an emotional distance. But it was impossible not to be moved last month, after I wrote about the late Kirk Brandt, and his family’s decision to donate his organs, when they reached out to thank me for honoring their son and brother.

A longtime sports writer from a weekly magazine, I had — and still have — much to learn about newspapering. I’m slowly picking it up, thanks to a newsroom full of ass-kicking, but also patient and generous, reporters and editors.

Sitting in my Stalag-like freshman dorm at Colgate, wondering if I’d ever make it as a writer, I could not have wished for better colleagues, or a more fulfilling journey in journalism. That was 1979, when one of the go-to cassettes I’d slip into my gleaming new boombox was the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed,” featuring a song whose lyrics resonate more deeply for me now than they did four decades ago:

“You can't always get what you want

But if you try sometime,

You just might find

You get what you need.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.