I always knew his first love was flying. How could I be jealous of an airplane?
When we had been married only two years, we bought a new car. Camera in hand, I drove to the hangar. Jim was outside polishing his beloved Fairchild. I parked beside the plane and said, “There, you can take a picture of your three favorite things, your wife, your plane and your new car.” “Yes,” said he with a very wide grin on his face, “But stand a little behind the wing, will you?”
A friend of ours once said, “Jim is the only guy I know who, if a beautiful blonde and an airplane went by at the same time, could tell you the registration of the airplane.”
These stories are legendary in our family. Behind the legend is James Hargrave Murray, named after his grandfather, one of the first settlers in Medicine Hat.
Quiet, calm, determined, he kept his “cool” as today’s generation would say. Thus he served three and a half years in Training Command in the Royal Canadian Air Force in WWII. He took his wartime savings, bought his first plane and started a flying charter service out of Medicine Hat in 1946, the Medicine Hat Air Service. He became a hero to the snowed-in rural residents of southern Alberta. Nightly we would tune in the Medicine Hat radio station whose lead story would often be “Jim Murray does it again.”
How can his many flights be capsulated? He flew to Elkwater landed on skis on the frozen lake, picked up an adult and four children severely ill with the flu to bring them to Medicine Hat hospital. He recalls, “The lake was drifted and rough. All the kids were crying, but by the time we got to the Hat, they were all asleep. That same day he flew a farmer to his home in Fox Valley, landing behind the house in a field packed with snow. There were no phones, no snow ploughs, no skidoos, but there were “fence phones.” Word quickly spread that he was coming. A neighbour needed to be flown to the hospital in Maple Creek. The flu was rampant. He was asked to please go north to Golden Prairie for another sick patient needing to be taken to the Maple Creek hospital. Then he went on to Richmound. Four hours later, with the fuel indicator on empty, he landed at the Medicine Hat (XH) airport. XH is the flying terminology for Medicine Hat as is YC for Calgary.
The first winter he flew an open cockpit by-plane. It was parked outside at the XH airport as permission had not yet been received to use the empty ex-Air Force hangars. The aircraft would be so cold in the morning, he could literally hang on the prop and it would not move. He and his mechanic would have to put blow pots under the engine to warm it up enough to start it. There was also no heater in the plane and when he would land after a trip they would have to almost lift him out of the plane he would be so cold.
In Empress, he was the first light plane to land after the war. He had to land going around the race track. He was flying a metal clad Cessna 140. They let school out and the kids started carving their initials on the fuselage!
On one emergency call in the dark, the neighbours lined their vehicles up with the lights shining to show him where to land.
Many times he flew a doctor to a sick patient who was snowed in. Once, the doctor delivered a baby and they returned to XH with the doctor, mother and new baby all squeezed in the plane.
One memorable trip occurred when he took a lady home to her farm. The weather was questionable and Jim warned her that if it got too bad he would turn back to XH. “I’ll pray,” she said. As they flow over the location of her farm, the clouds opened up. He landed, dropped her off, and took off again as the clouds closed in behind him.
These are all memories now. Jim is 85 and doesn’t fly anymore. Once in a while someone will come up to him and say, “Aren’t you Jim Murray? I remember you flying into our farm when I was a little kid. You were my hero.”
He’s still mine.
