Tom and Paula Murphy may be the only couple on Earth who own a mortuary, two newspapers and a television station, produce their own cooking show and develop business software for the newspaper industry.
Only in a little town like Trinidad could the Murphys’ big-city spectrum of enterprises be braided together.
Where else but in far-flung hamlets can you find a taxidermy shop in the back of a private home, a beauty salon in a paneled addition and a working school bus parked in the driveway?
Little towns give energetic entrepreneurs plenty of room to roam. And the Murphys have more space under one roof than most people, anywhere.
Their archipelago of businesses is run out of a 16,000-square-foot, 19th-century labyrinth on Main Street in Trinidad’s historic downtown.
This is the place where Tom Murphy, 46, became involved with his father’s mortuary business roughly 15 years ago. He was in graduate school in Colorado Springs, studying accounting, when, in stark shades of the HBO series “Six Feet Under,” his father died, leaving him to run Mullare-Murphy Funeral Home.
This is where five years ago Paula Murphy, 47, moved the office of The Trinidad Times-Independent after she and Tom bought it (the same month she married Tom in the house’s airy chapel) and where two years later, almost on a lark, the couple figured out how to start their own cable television station.
Public and private life overlap in the Murphys’ world, and not merely at the edges. The couple hasn’t taken a vacation in more than three years. They call their gargantuan attic – a space larger than many Denver homes – their “cabin,” because it serves that purpose.
“We don’t go anywhere,” Paula says during a tour of the attic. “We escape up here. We’re always working.”
To grasp the couple’s many-tentacled working life in all of its tangled complexity, you need to first understand the huge sandstone house, built by the engineer who created Trinidad’s first water-flow system.
In a subterranean garage, the bodies of the recently departed are transferred from a Dodge Caravan or a white Cadillac hearse on a gurney, and then wheeled to an elevator in a garage and lifted to a silver refrigerated cooler just outside of the room on the main floor where they are prepared for viewing. The room is adjacent to a larger room full of caskets on display.
The mortuary garage also sports a wall painted vivid lime – a “green screen” for productions like weather forecasts, where the TV personality in reality stands in front of a green wall, but on television it appears as a map of America.
In the basement, one floor up from the garage, is the newspaper and cable TV office: a dim room filled with computers and phones and office ephemera and people hunched before monitors. Next to the newsroom is an exercise room, and next to that an old stone-walled coal chute that was recently converted into a wine cellar.
A house of many uses
Go one floor up from the casket showroom and the serene chapel, and you’ll confront the big master bathroom with the sunken tub, the private porch, a few more bedrooms, and an enormous, granite-sheathed, Viking-appliance-decorated kitchen, where every week Paula hosts “Who’s Cooking with Paula Murphy.”
Ascend from there into the leviathan attic, with assorted couches and chairs, a big television, several rooms, and a door leading to a massive concrete rooftop porch, with views of the town and the mountains and lots of places to sit and relax.
“We climb a lot of stairs,” Paula says.
How did it all happen? How did this couple build such an unlikely empire?
It starts in 1985, when Paula, a Trinidad-native, entered the news business. In 12 years, she had risen to publisher of The Raton Range and what was then called Trinidad Plus.
Shortly before she began her newspaper career, Tom Murphy’s father, a South Dakota funeral director, bought Mullare Funeral home in the historic Chappelle Mansion on Trinidad’s Millionaire’s Row and went into business with Tom’s older brother, Michael.
Tom’s dad and brother eventually parted ways, and Tom, who had a degree in mortuary science, moved to Trinidad to help out.
After his dad died, Tom stayed put, spending the next few decades working obsessively on the house. He turned a carriage house into an apartment for his mother, built the chapel, and on, and on and on and on.
As Paula rose through the newspaper ranks and Tom ran the business and renovated the house, they had said little more than hello to each other.
Then one night they sat near each other at the bar in the local Elks Club, and they clicked. They dated for a couple of years before deciding to marry.
Keeping the newspapers local
About a year before the wedding, they learned the company that owned the newspapers was putting them up for sale. The day before they took their vows, Paula and Tom bought the Trinidad and Raton newspapers.
They weren’t wealthy, but they figured out how to finance a deal that kept the newspapers from going to a chain in some distant town, and kept alive the two-newspaper rivalry in a town of only 9,000 residents.
(The daily Chronicle-News, the Times-Independent’s rival for scoops and ad dollars, is just a stone’s throw from the Murphys’ offices.)
The purchase was Tom’s idea, and shortly after, he had another: People frequently complained to him that they missed so-and-so’s funeral because they never saw the death notice. Instead of relying on the twice-weekly newspaper to publicize funerals, he thought, why not post them on one of the local cable TV community bulletin boards?
The suits who ran the local cable business said they could not publish death notes because of their “franchise agreement.”
So Tom unearthed the agreement in a city office and by the time he was finished reading, concluded there was nothing stopping him and Paula from starting their own television station and posting their own notices.
So they did.
Even though they knew nothing about television technology, they figured out how to create a funeral-notice bulletin board, and then they started broadcasting city council meetings, a weekly Catholic Mass and a handful of Protestant church services and sports matches for kids between kindergarten and fifth grade (they also sell DVDs of the tots’ contests after the broadcasts). They even broadcast meetings of a local ambulance board.
Reshaping a community
Paula says the station played a role in the changing of the guard on the ambulance board: Viewers didn’t always like what they saw in the members.
Trinidad Mayor Joseph Reorda agreed the TV cameras helped shake up the board, and he championed the cameras’ role in keeping city business out in the open. But the cameras – a new addition to city government, which in the past was covered only by print media – have their downsides, he says.
“I think that has caused people to not say things they would normally say,” he says. “I think people become actors and actresses, rather than do the job they were elected to do.”
The video attention, he says, “kind of retards people from being active. People used to come to our meetings, and now they don’t because it’s on television.”
And for those city residents not transfixed by footage of city elders sitting at a table talking about potholes and zoning ordinances, there’s the cooking show.
The first host of the show didn’t work out, so Paula, “kicking and screaming,” took over. She’s an energetic and enthusiastic cook but never saw herself as a TV personality.
Now, she loves it. The idea? The Murphys find people in town who love to cook, then invite them on the show.
“I walk down the aisles at Wal-Mart and people wave at me, people I don’t know,” she says. “I had a standing picture for a column in the paper for years. I’ve been in the town for my whole life. But they recognize me from this TV show.”
This year they plan to add a craft show, a health program, and regular hour-long, in-depth news offerings.
For now, they don’t make money from the Trinidad Times Television, but Tom has dedicated himself to learning television production. He thinks they’ll be ready next year to start airing paid commercials.
“We’re just at the doorway” of turning the television venture into a viable commercial enterprise, says Tom. “Paula and I know now we can do it all.”
As for the newspapers, they – along with people in advertising – take pictures, write stories, sell ads and do whatever it takes.
“As publisher (and owner), they say, ‘Hey Paula, we don’t have any toilet paper in the bathroom,’ and guess who puts it in there? We do everything,” Paula says. “I think a publisher’s role in the small newspaper is to add an extra person in every single department. I’m working on an ad deal right now, in a little while I’ve got to write three stories. Of course I take pictures, I go to luncheons, I work overtime.”
Does she rest? Maybe for 15 minutes or so on a Sunday, she says. But “free time” tends to get swallowed up by doing the laundry or the dishes or some other household chore.
“I just hope that I haven’t developed a heart disease from the stress,” says Paula. “I thank God that I drink wine. A lot of wine.”
She adds, “It’s been so long since I’ve been bored.”
Staff Writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
