Pat Murray

Her family’s maid sang folk songs as she worked, and six-year-old Gudrun Fischel sang along with her – a few notes lower. 

“It sounded pretty,” says Pat Murray, who acquired her American nickname from a co-worker who couldn’t pronounce Gudrun, and her surname from husband Kip, also a member of the Meeting House Choir.

“And I’ve been an alto ever since,” she adds. She also plays the recorder and hand bells at First Congregational Church. 

Pat’s is a story with hardships during and after World War II, a courageous move without family to the United States, and advanced studies in Germany and in America.  As a teen-ager in Germany, she earned an F minus in English.  After graduating from the University of Texas, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa!  She became a citizen in 1965.  Her many careers included nursing and marketing facial implants, with business trips all over the U.S. and Canada.  During their 48-year marriage, Pat and Kip raised two daughters and have by this time two great-grandchildren.

The War and Its Aftermath

Gudrun was born in Dϋsseldorf and soon began spending many nights with her family in cellars, fearing for their lives from the bombing that virtually flattened the city.  To escape, four-year-old Gudrun, her mother and three siblings moved to a Baltic Sea community near where her father was stationed.  She recalls playing with sea shells, eating fish and enjoying green ice cream.   

As the war moved closer, they relocated to her father’s home town in the Hunsrϋck Mountains.  There, her favorite toy was a pair of stilts, made by a friend.  Her school had been bombed, so the six-year-old carried a chair to school each day, knelt on the floor and used the chair as a writing surface.

Forced to return to Dϋsseldorf after the war, the family experienced poverty, because Germany’s former currency had been wiped out.  There was hunger, rationing, long lines and other hardships.  Their apartment was still there, but they were obliged to share it with their renters.  Gudrun, 8 years old when the war ended, slept on the floor for three years. “Vegetables” were edible weeds, collected on the outskirts of town. Her mother had canned food stored in the cellar, until one night someone broke in and stole all of it.

Neighbors shared from their own meager food supplies, but hunger was a reality for almost everyone.  Then an English-speaking member of Gudrun’s church thought to appeal for help from friends in England, who apparently organized assistance through their church.  The English family assigned to Gudrun’s family wrote to explain that, while they were not in a position to help, they had written to family members in New Zealand.   Sure enough, canned food, clothing and other necessities started arriving from Auckland!

As life began to return to normal, with musician parents, music lessons for Gudrun were perhaps a given: violin at 8 years of age and piano at 10.  By the time she was 15, Gudrun was proficient enough in the piano to consider becoming a concert pianist but later decided that music was more enjoyable as a hobby.

“Music has fed my soul,” she says.

After an entrance exam at 10 years of age, she was placed in a “gymnasium” – meaning she would study (with 2,000 other girls) such subjects as Latin, English, and French and other college-prep subjects.

After high school, she entered nursing.  Aiming to become a health social worker, she went to graduate school, later working for a health department near Frankfurt.  Some of her tasks, such as helping mothers with newborns and vaccinating children, were mandated by the government.

And on to the U.S.

Gudrun had an organ teacher whose wife immigrated to the United States, leaving her four-year-old son in Germany.  She found a sponsor for Gudrun, who then was able to immigrate, taking with her the little boy.  We’ll let Pat tell this part of her story:

“We sailed on the S.S. United States, arriving 6 ½ days later in New York.  We then spent 40 hours traveling to Austin, Texas, vegetarians existing on bread from sandwiches with the meat removed, because U.S. Customs had confiscated the dried fruit we had planned to eat on the train.

“We arrived on Thanksgiving Day, 1960.  I lived with my sponsor, an invalid who needed my help.  But I also became the daughter she never had, for we formed a deep friendship.

“The British English I had learned in Germany did not prepare me for the Texas Hill Country variety of English.  My transportation was a second-hand bike, which I purchased for $12.50.  My first job was at the University of Texas Chuck Wagon, where I met Kip, a daily customer there.

“Later, I found a position in the Experimental Science Building, slowly improved on my English, and began making plans for obtaining an American education.  In the summer of 1966, I received a B.A. degree in Linguistics with a minor in Japanese.”

By this time, she and Kip had been married for several years.  With daughter

Annette, they moved to Houston, where Kip was to teach math at the University of Houston.  Daughter Susie was born in 1968.

During and even after her life as a homemaker, Pat stayed usefully occupied.  As a Board member of Phi Beta Kappa Alumni of Greater Houston, she helped select winners of scholarships the organization awarded each year to one graduating student of every high school in the greater Houston area.

She shared her musical talents in churches, eventually settling down at First Congregational.  She expressed her love for the sea by using sea shells to create “shell paintings.”

And for about four years, she helped raise a friend’s child.  A law school graduate, that child, who is black, passed the Texas Bar on her first try and is today a prosecutor in Ft. Worth.

Pat’s and Kip’s own daughters have success stories as well:

 Annette co-owns restaurants, sings and plays guitar in the Denver area and is looking forward to participating in the Kirchentag (church day), a major gathering of Protestants in Munich in May 2010. She has two adult children.

 Susie, a Harvard math ScD, is Associate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan.  She and her husband have five-year-old identical twin boys.

Pat’s professional life included a series of unusual jobs, which typically included editing the writing of her American associates.  She wound up her career working as a private investigator, running background checks on potential hospital employees and volunteers. 

“I have enjoyed my life,” she says.  “Americans, Texans especially, have been absolutely wonderful to me.”