Closing up

By Sam Harvey
Staff Reporter

	Special to the Coastal Point • SAM HARVEY Theresa ‘Tess’ Murray will close Murray’s Bait & Tackle after more than 50 years.

Murray, age 82, has been there since the beginning — and she’d keep working if she could.

“I’ve been working my whole life,” she attested. “I grew up on a farm, so that should tell you something.”

Her father had sold his farm in New York, moving to the virtually unsettled area between Laurel and Georgetown — a place called Hitchens Crossroad.

“We raised cucumbers, cantaloupes, watermelons, tomatoes,” she recalled. “Everything but potatoes.” (Her father had apparently had enough of that end of the business.)

Murray left the farm upon her graduation from Laurel High School and went to work in Seaford, for DuPont. The Great Depression had given way to war, and from 1942 through 1946, she manufactured airplane tires and parachutes.

She married James Murray after the war, and moved to the Ocean View area. The Murrays raised chickens for a time — he at the Indian River experimental poultry farm (where the Salt Pond is now), she at local houses.

“Eventually, he got the shop built up, and I didn’t have to do that anymore,” she recalled. Her husband took to the bay, crabbing and casting the net for baitfish, while Murray tended the store and set to raising her children — a son and three daughters.

She described each one in turn — “I’m proud of all my young’uns,” Murray boasted.

Ellen Magee runs a farm in Williamsville. Bonnie Cooper works for a bank and lives a stone’s throw from Murray’s Bait & Tackle. Charles Murray is a colonel in the Air Force. Shirley Price is a real estate agent and former state representative for the district.

Price took a hand in the family business, accompanying her father onto the river as he started getting on in years. “She can throw a mean cast-net for finger mullet,” Murray asserted.

Murray said she expects the shop to stay open at least through the dates of the Bethany-Fenwick Area Chamber of Commerce’s Fall Surf-fishing Tournament, Oct. 8-9.

“We’ll close after that, I guess — we’ll see how much stuff I can get rid of before then,” Murray quipped.

Until then, she will likely continue to rise at 6 a.m., an hour before the shop opens, put on the coffeepot and prepare for the early rush — a group of regulars who usually show up at 7 a.m. for coffee and chit-chat.

Though she’s been at it for more than 50 years, Murray expressed no real desire to retire. She mentioned a hobby or two — maybe some needlepoint, or jigsaw puzzles. But to judge from her past record, Murray will probably just transition into helping out with the family storage business without so much as a couple weeks off.

Murray’s Bait & Tackle is located on Cedar Neck Road, north of Ocean View. For more information, call 539-7455.