Ed Murdoch was no ordinary trucker

Reflective and philosophical is how I’m feeling right now as I sit down to write on this last day of August. It’s been a week. Within hours of each other I lost a dear cousin due to an evil cancer and then saw the birth of my third granddaughter a zillion miles away in Australia. A well-worn phrase popped into my head – the circle of life – as a mixture of sadness and joy infused the day.

Sometimes it’s hard to live, sometimes it’s easy.

And while I had intended to write about predictive diagnostics in this space, it became clear that I had to do something else. Something more meaningful. Which was to write about an extraordinary man, one of us, who lived life to the full until he couldn’t, a man who wasn’t afraid to take a risk and reaped rewards because of it.

So I’m paying tribute to an old friend of mine and, I suspect, a friend to many of you. Long-time trucker J. Edgar Murdoch died in July after a lengthy illness that included several heart attacks and several other ailments. He was 88 and took his last breath in an Alberta hospice facility, having moved to that province just last year after more than three decades in Enderby, B.C. He made that big move to be with a woman he’d met online, and talked about her like a guy in his 20s having fallen in love for the first time. They were made for each other, it seems, both having lost their long-time mates in recent years. It’s a story for the ages.

Ed was not like other people.

He spent 50 years on the road as both company driver and owner-operator, another 10 in the office as a safety director, held a Class 1 licence for 63 years, and racked up more than 5 million safe miles across North America. That’s a fine record but he was much, much more than that.

In fact, he was something of a renaissance man with talents above and beyond what most people would expect of a truck driver. Certainly not least among them, he was an accomplished opera singer, a baritone vocalist who spent two years with the Festival of Canada Music group traveling across Canada and Europe and singing solo with many Canadian orchestras.

Earlier, as a student at Upper Canada College, a private boys’ high school in Toronto, his hometown, he played for its football team and was actually invited to the Argonauts’ training camp back in the 1950s. That didn’t happen but he later played in the professional Ontario Rugby Football Union. He also attended McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.

But trucking eventually grabbed him so it’s back to music for a moment and one of the most unlikely moves ever: interviewed for an article on the Airdrie City View website by Carmen Cundy last January, Ed said he decided to become a longhaul truck driver while studying with a coach from the New York Metropolitan Opera Company. Well, of course, a natural progression if there ever was one.

A man of many, many talents, he produced his own program – on which he was known as ‘The Road Dog’ – on the Voice of the Shuswap Community Radio station in Salmon Arm, B.C. That was launched in 2012 and continued until his recent move one province east. He often wrote in trucking magazines and published an autobiography, Driving Through My Memories, back in 2014.

To say the least, Ed was quite the guy — hell, at 87 and by then confined to a wheelchair, he went skydiving!

We should all live such a life as Ed did, but most of us don’t have the courage or the spark or whatever it is that makes some people reach higher than others. As role models go, he was a pretty good one. He will be missed.