Pearl

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Tom Murphy-a life-long runner-taught in Boston schools where he quickly fell in with the road running crowd. WithJohn J. Kelley, the 1957 Boston Marathon winner, Tom wrote Just Call Me Jock in 1982, a history of the Boston Marathon as seen through the eyes of Jock Semple, the colorful race co-director. Tom's novel, Runner in Red, which will be published by Encircle in April 2018, draws on a real-life Boston Marathon legend that a woman "wearing red" jumped into the 1951 Boston Marathon, which if true would make her the first woman to have run a marathon on American soil. Tom's novel is a fictional search for the 'runner in red' to solve the mystery. In 2006, Tom wrote a book about the aviation heroes on 9/11, called Reclaiming the Sky, which led the president of Fordham University to invite Tom to create an institute, the Human Resiliency Institute, to put healing lessons from the book into programs. The institute's lead program, (Resiliency) Edge4Vets, teaches vets how to tap their strengths to get jobs. See more at edge4vets.org. Tom also created a beer, called Barb's Beer, to raise funds to help cure lung cancer in his late wife (a Boston Marathon runner's) name. See more at barbsbeer.org.