Cort Memoriam

Saying goodbye to a true working class hero, the Bard of Alief, Cort McMurray

Righteous but never self-righteous, snarky without being cruel, too wise to show off his intelligence unnecessarily, Cort McMurray, writer, and Cort McMurray the man, were inseparable. The man loved what was real and honest and solid and true and abhorred sham and pretense of every sort. 

He had a way of comforting you even as he was questioning you. 

While we both had our issues with social media, I am very grateful for its existence tonight, as I have six years of treasured correspondence with Cort. Looking back through it, I see a few threads: first, each of us promising to meet up for tacos and never following through. (What I wouldn’t give….though we did make it happen, once.) Second, his faith. He loved to expound upon Mormon teachings, and I learned a lot about his people through him,

We loved to compare our upbringings and philosophies. He had great admiration for certain aspects of Catholicism, the Jewish people in general, the non-militant wings of Islam, and pretty much every other faith on the planet except for Evangecalism. If there was one thing Cort McMurray could not abide it was hypocrisy, and he’d seen enough exhibited by the Evangelical crowd before they jumped en masse aboard the Trump Train to form a hearty dislike. And he’d also seen enough of them that this development came as no surprise. Anyone who truly knew and understood Evangelicals was not mystified by it. In some manner that defies description, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

Here is Cort from our correspondence, speaking on what he believed the role of his people to be.

“I believe, with all my heart, that part of the reason God put Mormons on the planet is to fill a role similar to that of the Jews: to be in the society, but not quite of the society, to be acutely aware of the culture, but separate enough from it that they could make powerful, transformative comment on the culture,” he wrote. “So what have we done, we Mormons? We went very insular, and very Republican, and we gave America Donny and Marie and Steve Young, football hero. (We also sort of kind of gave the world Warren Zevon. You can look it up. But that's another story).”

He was so proud of Zevon as a member of his tribe. Also the band Low, whose song “Just Like Christmas” I sent him early in our correspondence. He likened the drums on it to “thunder-snow.” When you grow up somewhere like North Tonawanda, NY, you see every manner of snowstorm, he explained, and sometimes, there’s thunder with the snow. He also loved how the band could wring melancholy out of the joy -- “that is an underrated trait of ours,” he said. 

Listening to it now...this is the first time I’ve wept since we lost him. 

“I hated almost everything about my childhood, except for the endless grey skies of winter, and the feeling late at night, standing outside while snow fell.  You feel like the world is ending, but in a really good way,” he said. 

You could take Cort from Buffalo but (you know the rest). At one point we were joking about moving back to where we’d spent our childhoods. 

Buffalo is same as it ever was: cynical. Paranoid. Defensive. Dripping with schnapps and Catholicism. And everywhere you go, Buffalo Bills merchandise. It's actually a horrible place. The scenery is nice, though.

The term “working-class hero” has taken a beating over the years, in some small part because its embodiment today in America has devolved on the shoulders of Bruce Springsteen and Michael Moore. Cort, a true working class hero, thought Moore romanticized the working class, whiffed on the sense of shame and failure so many feel in America, the Land of Opportunity.

“My dad was a drywall finisher. He wouldn't even let me handle tools when I was growing up. "You're going to college," he'd say. You don't see this in the work of traditional lefty, Michael Moore types, but the working class is ashamed of being working class, and being working class is the last thing they want for their kids. A good friend has a PhD in math, from Cal Berkeley. He also is an accomplished woodworker, and he redid the plumbing of his house: his dad, who was also educated, thought it was important he know those things. My dad thought knowing those things meant you had failed in life.”

Which is not the way Cort wanted the world to be, and it was not the way he lived his own life. Here he expounds on the theme at length: 

When I was in high school, I signed up for the ACT. I was taking it because at the time BYU did not recognize the SAT, and I really wanted to go to BYU. Very few kids took the ACT in upstate New York.

My guidance counselor called me in. He asked me why I was taking the ACT. "Son," he said, "you don't need to take that test to go to trade school."

I got a 27 composite on the ACT, with a 34 on the English portion, and I think a near perfect score on the history portion. I bombed the math. It was still a really good score for 1980.

My father was either sick or dying from my eighth grade year to my 11th grade year, when he finally died. That, coupled with a complete disinterest in anything that didn't interest me, and a tendency to procrastinate made me a generally lousy student. 

My guidance counselor suggested trade school, not because he thought I had an aptitude for the trades, but because he thought I was too stupid for college. That is the general perception, no matter what anybody says: smart people go to college. Dummies go to trade school.

I have a political science degree that I have never used to earn gainful employment, mainly because I wanted to prove to that guidance counselor that I wasn't stupid. I also have almost a philosophy degree and a minor in English and a whole pile of classes in economics, because no one in my family had ever been to college before me, and I thought you just took classes you were interested in until they gave you a degree.

My professional career has been almost all manual labor. I'm a freaking pool man. I hate it - backyard swimming pools are selfish and morally questionable, and they undermine the notion of community, plus at least 40% of backyard pool owners are real jerks - but I have learned more about logic changing the brakes on a Toyota Tacoma or mapping out a set of pool routes, than I ever learned in the classroom.

What I want is a world where kids who love writing and love reading and love history and love art can pursue all of those things, while simultaneously pursuing a career in mechanics or plumbing or AC repair, and not feel like they're failures. The stuff that really feels like my life - my church service, my relationship with my wife and kids, the stuff I try to write - has absolutely nothing to do with my career. That feels like the way life is supposed to be.”

Oh, I don’t know...And towards the end, Cort was all about nothing but gratitude. He seemed to sense the end was coming even before he took ill, and instead of bitterness he preached gratitude. 

He would cuss me for it Mormon style but I can’t help but feel like his life did not turn out the way it was supposed to. And dang it, y’all, in an only slightly better world Cort should have been able to quit that grueling pool job and write for a very nice living and a long time ago. 

But it shouldn’t even have taken that. All we really needed was a functioning media ecosphere, like that existed before the Internet ruined everything. The powers-that-be at the Chronicle should have seen all that great (unpaid) work he was doing for Lisa Gray, who tried her best to trumpet this Bard of Alief (he would punch me in the shoulder for that) to the world.

They should have known this was what he was capable of in his very rare moments of spare time. And maybe think, you know, what this city really needs is a man of the people columnist, someone who came to Houston to stick around, not some hired gun from another paper or another kid who sees this job as a stepping stone to the brighter lights of a bigger city. Someone who could be something like the Mormon Mike Royko of Alief, just spitting truths and righteousness at the issues of the day, ones he absorbed with acute sensitivity, humor, and a depth of 3-D empathy that are all so rare, singularly, and almost non-existent in combination.

So the Chronicle hires him and then the next thing you know he starts taking on issues of national interest, and his column gets syndicated, and then you start getting the book deals and the next thing you know, Cort McMurray is the LDS Leonard Pitts and the Pulitzer committee comes knocking and he has some book out like Tuesdays with Morrie (which he may well have hated, I dunno; I’ve not read it myself) and he’s rich as Croesus, and….well I can’t imagine Cort with a private plane or even a first yacht much less a second. He’d be giving so much of that money back to the community, and, well, on second thought, it’s hard to imagine Cort able to cope with the selfishness it would require to become that big of a star. I am a writer; as a rule, we are jerks. It’s part of the job description. While he wanted the whole world to hear his words, he would not have that done if it meant stepping on others in his field or not being there for his family in time of need or even just time of want, like something as basic and simple as “Cort, we’d like you at dinner tonight.” 

But his talent was that great. And it’s a shame so much of it was frittered away scrubbing algae blossoms out of pools or endlessly driving back and forth from Alief to Pasadena and all points in between. Did you know that much of his writing was composed in his work truck, on his phone? 

In low moments, he’d lament his lot in life, though never without a gallows sense of humor. (Half Polish and half Irish, such jokes came to him naturally.) He was the last person to cast blame in any direction other than his own, as he makes clear here. 

I had a leader in my younger days who is very fond of saying that nothing influences our relationship with God quite as profoundly as our relationship with our father,” he wrote. “If your father was cold, distant, and critical, you perceive God as a cold, distant, and critical being. If he was kind and loving, you tend to think of God as a benevolent force in the universe. 

I’ve spent most of my life and leadership positions in our church, and there’s a lot of handwringing about the number of people who ‘fall away.’ There’s always a scapegoat: R-rated movies. The rock and roll. Internet pornography. Smoking on the weed. Those things have their influence. But what really kills faith, what really unravels families, is jerk parents.

We never give ourselves enough credit for our failures.

Never fail to give yourself credit for your failures. Be extremely grateful when things work out. Those are some of the standards by which Cort McMurray lived his life. 

And he died on the 100th birthday of Marvin Zindler. While Cort did not make it to that Houston icon stage, he well deserved it, and earned it among those of us fortunate enough to have known him, for he was a living reminder of Marvin Zindler’s other adage, no, not the SLIME, IN THE ICE MACHINE one, but his “It’s hell to be poor” segments in which Marvin righted wrongs, afflicted the comfortable to comfort the afflicted, was a man with a plan to help the least of us. Cort did all of that, in his writing and at his church. 

He was, in the words of his fan Rachel Dvoretzky, “the loving conscience of our city.”

Here are a bare sampling of the testimonials from his own Facebook page:

So sorry to hear of Cort's passing. Although I never had the privilege of meeting him in person, i felt like we knew each other and had become friends. We were both from Upstate NY and would exchange our memories of the peculiar foibles of that area.

He was one of the most gifted writers I've ever known, and used his abilities to bring people joy, and to help us understand and accept one another. How I wish his time on Earth wasn't so brief. Cort will be remembered for his kindness and humor. I will greatly miss him. — Dennis Cass

Brother McMurray was my seminary teacher. He became a friend to me, as well. He always had amazing stories and jokes along with a beautiful way of sharing love and the gospel. I love brother McMurray so much. I know he's at peace sending love to all his family and friends. I am keeping his loved ones in my prayers. May you all feel the Lord's love and comfort in these times. May he rest in beautiful peace. Til we meet again… we love you brother McMurray! — Brenda Lezama Rodriguez

Oh man!! I hate to hear this!!! He wasn’t just a bishop to my family, he was a friend and father to me! This hurts!! I am so sad to hear this! Praying for the family— Ijeoma Nwogu 

I’ve typed and deleted several messages that just don’t seem to cover the way that Cort’s passing hits me. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in close to 15 years, along with many other members of the LDS church that I grew up in. But Cort was one of the great ones. There’s no one that I ever witnessed more faith in, no one that had a stronger testimony, no one that lived the gospel the way that he did. Cort McMurray was a phenomenal person that I had the utmost respect for. This world is a little bit darker today without his light here. What an incredible loss. Lynda and family, I’m so very sorry for your loss. — Michael Greer

It’s my hope that we can remember him through something eternal. Cort McMurray Park has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? And perhaps we should come together and cobble together an anthology of his works, and that anthology could exist so that the curious visitors to Cort McMurray Park might know Cort the way we were blessed to have done.

Rest easy on that mountain Cort, where the Bills finally do win that Super Bowl, and the Astros World Series win was untainted by the non-scandal we disagreed so vehemently on, and where no cheap Mattress Mack publicity ploy goes unpunished.

And I can’t not allow him to have the last word. As I said, he seemed to have a premonition the end was near, and on July 17th, just before he went into the hospital, he had this to say:

”I do have one last thing to say. I believe with every fiber of my being there is a purpose to life. I believe that every single one of us, even the worst of us, has value and merit and is deserving of love.”