Jimmy Murphy, tour operator extraordinaire and a founder of both Brendan Tours and AmaWaterways, died on Dec. 18 at age 82 after a yearlong bout with cancer, and his family is remembering him today, Dec. 22 at his funeral. But I have a very special memory of him that I will treasure forever.
This past summer, Gary Murphy, Jimmy's son and a good friend, invited me to meet with Jimmy at his home in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles. I was a bit apprehensive about it, because I knew Jimmy's condition had deteriorated since he learned at the beginning of the year he had terminal cancer. But Gary assured me Jimmy would enjoy my visit and I could even interview him about his life and times if I liked.
I've known Jimmy for roughly 20 years, not a long time compared to many others in the travel industry, but he was always the consummate gentlemen to me, a true prince in the tour industry and subsequently in the river cruise segment. He and I had dinner together a few times over the years, most recently last year when he was focused on promoting AmaWaterways, the river cruise company for which he served as chairman and co-founder.
So this past July I showed up at the Murphy home to see Jimmy and get his life story, if you will. And he had an extraordinary life in travel! As he told me this summer: "When I think of my beginnings, it's been a charmed existence." Indeed, the famed luck of the Irish is in evidence throughout Jimmy's career.
He was born in Dublin in 1932, but his first experience in travel was as an office boy for a local Dublin travel agency run by Leslie Harris. He served as a messenger taking passports to local embassies to get visas for travelers.
While Jimmy's parents wanted him to go to school to become an auto mechanic, Harris convinced them to let Jimmy served as an apprentice starting as a teenager. He was with that travel agency for 12 years, helping Irish travelers get to England, France and Spain.
According to Jimmy, in those days in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in order to get to the Balearic islands off the coast of Spain from Dublin, a popular trip of that time, you had to take the train to the coast, take a boat to England, take another train to London, take yet another train to the English coast, take a ferry across the channel, take a train to Paris, take yet another train to the border between France and Spain, take a different train to Barcelona, and then yet another ferry to the islands. It took roughly two days.
In 1955, at the age of 23, Jimmy decided to go to America to join a travel agency run by Raymond Whitcomb in New York. Jimmy's agency had served as Whitcomb's representative in Ireland so he had secured a job offer from Whitcomb. But then a week before he was set to leave Dublin, and a week after he had gotten married to his wife Sheila, who survives him today, Whitcomb sold his agency, but promised he still had a job for Jimmy in Philadelphia.
Jimmy continued with his plan to go to America, but decided that instead of Philadelphia he wanted to go to New York, since he had a good friend from Ireland living in the city. He interviewed with Cunard Line in lower Manhattan at the company's old address at 25 Broadway. His wife moved over from Ireland with him and they found a home in Staten Island.
For Jimmy, it was the perfect commute traveling by ferry from Staten Island to downtown Manhattan. He started in reservations, but quickly moved to sales when Cunard discovered his travel agency background. At the time, Cunard served as the general sales agent for P&O, Orient and a number of other lines.
Then, in 1958, Jimmy returned to his Irish roots, in a way, when he became a district sales manager for Aer Lingus. He began in New York, but the airline moved him out to Los Angeles for eight years, before it promoted him to passenger sales manager for the U.S. and moved him back to New York. He served with Aer Lingus for a total of 11 years,
"Being a passenger sales manager for Aer Lingus was a huge social position," Jimmy told me. "So as far as my parents were concerned I had really stepped in it….I had it made it in life. That was the best job in the whole world!"
In 1969, however, Jimmy decided to seek a much more entrepreneurial endeavor and move back to Los Angeles, where he had enjoyed living during his stint with Aer Lingus. He joined with the late Michael Keady and the late Bill Lawless to form Brendan Tours, now Brendan Vacations, which quickly developed into one of the leading escorted tour operators to Europe and Ireland, though it didn't start that way.
Indeed, Brendan began as a charter operation offering relatively inexpensive two-, three- and four-week Globus tour programs to London, Paris and Rome. It was only because of its name, and possibly because of Jimmy's rather obvious Irish roots, that it ventured into the Irish market.
"For five years I thought, my God, Jimmy you've made the most awful mistake," Jimmy told me, "leaving a pensionable and secure government job [with Aer Lingus] join a start-up tour operation in the charter business."
Nevertheless, the new venture proved to be a success. Eventually Jimmy bought out his two partners and diversified Brendan's offerings even more by venturing out to the South Pacific to sell programs to Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti and Fiji.
"I had a very good friend who was the vice president of sales for Air New Zealand and I was out in Santa Monica fishing with him," Jimmy told me. "Europe had gotten off to a great start and we had nine airplanes full. He asked me if we would think of going to the South Pacific. Other than knowing it was a long way away, I had no idea where it was. So I went down and visited all the people in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and Tahiti in a week. And we came back and decided to do a South Pacific program starting in 1973. We were the first American operator into the South Pacific. It went well and the margins were good."
Jimmy's son Gary joined him to expand Brendan into the South Pacific, as well as to solidify its reputation as an Irish specialist. Throughout Jimmy used his experience calling on travel agents with Aer Lingus to build his business at Brendan.
In 2006, Jimmy sold Brendan to Travel Corp., eventually leaving the company in 2009. Even before that he had joined with Rudi Schreiner and Kristin Karst to launch AmaWaterways, a new river cruise line affiliated with Brendan. After his departure, he continued as chairman of AmaWaterways as the company grew into a major luxury river operation. Jimmy remained chairman of AmaWaterways until his death last week.
As he told me back in July: "I have led a charmed life. When you think of coming to the U.S. at 23 and where it's all gone. As I say about my job: It provided a roof over our heads, it provided an education and starting point in life for our four kids. What more could you ask? And now I have friends all over the world."
Editor's Note: In Part II, I interview Jimmy Murphy about how the tour industry changed during his time in the business, as well as how he helped form the U.S. Tour Operators Association, and his final trip to Ireland earlier this year.
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