When I listen to Larry Murdock recount his years at Denison, I can’t help thinking of Gandalf, the wizard in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
It’s an easy association. Lord of the Rings happens to be Murdock’s favorite literary work. But it’s also because Murdock could be called our resident wizard. As Denison’s registrar, who retired this summer, he was responsible for keeping its records of enrollment and the academic standing of students. But he also was in charge of scheduling all the classes each semester, finding classrooms for them, and making sure they meshed with student numbers and needs. It’s a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, and he put it together each semester for 31 years.
That still doesn’t get to the extent of Murdock’s wizardry, however. I offer for your consideration the following: Close to commencement several years ago, Murdock learned that the twin sister of someone in the graduating class was going to graduate at Ohio Wesleyan University that same day. He realized that the parents were faced with what seemed like an insurmountable problem. How could both
of them attend the graduations of their daughters? Murdock conferred with his counterpart at OWU and worked out a solution. The Denison daughter was put at the head of the line of graduates and the OWU daughter was put at the rear. On the day of commencement the parents watched one daughter receive her diploma in Granville, then they drove over to Delaware (with a highway patrol escort) in time to see their other daughter receive hers.
Here’s another. At the end of the semester some years back, one instructor neglected to turn in her final grades. Phone calls were unanswered. E-mail did not yet exist. Persistent inquiry established that the instructor had left for a vacation in Hawaii. No one knew where she was staying. Murdock started calling Honolulu hotels until he located the errant academic. Soon he had her on the telephone. “How did you find me?” she asked in astonishment.
Murdock grew up in the coal mining region of Pennsylvania, the son of a butcher and a housewife, and attended Waynesburg College. He was the first person in his family to get a college degree. His campus job was working in the registrar’s office. After earning a master’s degree from Ohio University, he came to Denison in 1971 to assist former registrar Samuel Schaff, whom he succeeded 1978.
He notes that the Office of the Registrar is “the number one public relations office in the university. We deal with every constituency. We are always on.” When his retirement was announced at the spring Academic Convocation, the entire faculty rose to give him an extended standing ovation.
Tolkien wrote of Gandalf, “Merry he could be, and kindly to the young and simple, yet quick at times to sharp speech and the rebuking of folly … He would at times work wonders … yet such marvels he wrought mostly for mirth and delight, and desired not that any should hold him in awe or take his counsels out of fear.” He could just as well have been writing about Larry Murdock.