The imperfect congressman who treated his staff like family
In 1985, I was a junior at Clarion University with a dream of being a press secretary on Capitol Hill. The office of my local congressman, Austin Murphy, selected me to work as an intern for the month of July in his Washington, Pa., office.
No one in my family was politically connected. It was the strangest, and the luckiest, of flukes. Which I almost ruined.
He died on Saturday, at the age of 96.
The worst of mistakes
During the internship, I met him once, when he visited the “WashPA” office. On my last day he called to thank me for my service and invited me to “stop by” the staff summer picnic at his home in Monongahela in August.
I did more than “stop by.” As a newly minted legal age 21-year-old, I drank all day, got severely drunk, threw up all over his house, and passed out on his couch. I woke up the next morning, baffled and in horror. I knew that I had made the worst of mistakes.
I wrote apology notes to everyone I could think of in a futile attempt to save my fledgling political career, which ended faster than it started. I regrettably wrote off Austin Murphy.
Until he wrote to me. He thanked me for apologizing, said that my behavior happens to the best of us, and to contact his office after I graduated. I was flabbergasted and in disbelief.
My luck with Congressman Murphy continued when, after I graduated, he hired me to work at the “WashPa” office as a district representative, where I mainly handled constituent issues, and on occasion, drove the congressman to events around the Washington County. During one of those car rides, I told him I wanted to be a press secretary.
About a year after I started, I was watching “The Cosby Show” with my roommates, aka my parents, when the phone rang. It was the congressman.
His press secretary had resigned while the congressman was being reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee, and he needed a new one fast. It would be me, provided I could “get my ass to D.C. by eight o’clock” the next morning. And that’s where my career started.
I was 23 and had little to no idea about what a press secretary did. Plus something else that was complicating my future career in politics. I was deeply in the closet about my sexuality. I lived in fear of AIDS, and of anyone finding out I was gay.
But I went ahead and tried to push it down as far as I can. Luckily, I was surrounded by love. The congressman treated me like a son. He would find out years later I was gay, but that didn’t phase him in the least.
Treated like family
The media will probably write about Murphy’s trials ( literally) and tribulations, but that would leave out who Austin Murphy really was. For example, the Hill was, and still is, famous for its high turnover rate.
My friends at the time seemed to be switching jobs every six months, yet his office kept the same core team of six of us for five years. That was unheard of. And that’s because Austin Murphy treated us as if we were his own family.
Murphy took me under his wing. He let me tag along to several bill signings at the White House, invited me to a reception where we had a drink with Jimmy Stewart and Burt Lancaster. Snuck me a room to meet Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Those were just the high points.
In return, I drove him, hungover, off a West Virginia highway one early Monday morning heading back to D.C.
Once, he allowed me to drive his precious sailboat that I ran into a dock, crashing the front lantern.
He also found me one morning passed out on his office couch, He called me JC Casey, for “Jesus Christ Casey!” Need I explain why?
I was the first to leave our family, moving to New York City, to pursue an acting career. Luckily, it didn’t work out, and I got back into working with the media. It was easy to get a public relations job with the credentials I had built up as Austin Murphy’s press secretary.
One of a kind
I remained in touch with Austin through the rest of his life. I called him every year on June 17, his birthday. Those calls were always uproarious, even on his 96th birthday last year.
If there ever was someone who was one-of-kind, it was surely him. In all my years, I’ve never met anyone like Austin J. Murphy.
At the end of every call, I always told him I loved him, and thanked him profusely for giving me the start to my career. And he’d usually say, “JC Casey, I can’t believe I hired you after you threw up all over my house.” No one made me laugh quite like him.