Okay, I had to stretch to fit in a rhyme for ‘law,’ but bear with me. By it, I mean that I’m seeing Murphy’s paw prints all over the place, including down by the Walmart in Henderson. The reason it strikes my interest is that I pastored FBC in El Dorado, Arkansas, site Murphy USA’s corporate headquarters. When looked into it, I found that Murphy has over fourteen hundred stations in twenty-six states, over a thousand of them located adjacent to Walmarts. (And yes, those are two Arkansas corporations, the other one located in Bentonville.)

El Dorado is traditionally an oil town (but with other industries, including facilities processing chicken and others producing sulfuric acid, ammonia, and halon for airplane fire extinguishers). One of the early speculators was named H. L. Hunt, who went on to make it big in Texas. When I arrived in 1983, there were several oil companies with refineries, including the homebased Lion Oil (a palindrome, spelled the same forwards and backwards) and TOSCO (The Oil Shale Company). The price per barrel had bottomed out by the time I arrived, and extraction of oil from shale was no longer economically feasible, so the plant was sold to a company adept at neutralizing the toxic PCBs which had heretofore filled electrical transformers.

Some wonderful folks in our church worked for Murphy, one of them the husband of my secretary, Betty Monzingo. Her spouse Harold headed up Murphy’s Delta Farm and Timber division, focused on southern pine forestry, but also involved in real estate, such as development of Chenal Valley in Little Rock’s western growth corridor.

I have a crazy memory of the Murphy headquarters. I was over in their law library, doing some very early work that fed into a book I published recently, Cases and Maps: Introduction to Christian Philosophy. Finding an appellate opinion I needed, I was directed to a copy machine on the third floor balcony overlooking the atrium. I laid the book on the machine and pushed the copy button. At that very instant, all the power in the building went down. Folks came out of their offices to see what was going on, some of them hurrying about to get things fixed. And I played dumb, stepping back from the machine, half-convinced that I somehow had tripped a breaker by my little, extra call for power. I’m sure it was a coincidence, but I wasn’t so sure back then. If it was my fault, here’s a long-overdue “Sorry!”

Anyway, it warms my heart to see Murphy’s paw prints up Henderson, Kentucky way.