Uncrowned Community Builders

Dr. Benjamin F. Murphy was a physician in Buffalo for half a century and an authority on narcotics addition. He was known as a doctor who made house calls and treated people who could not pay. He maintained a private practice a t Broadway and Michigan Avenue for nearly 40 years. He also headed the outpatient methadone clinic at Sisters Hospital for 21 years.

He was a physician for the Buffalo Public Schools and the Erie County Health Department. He was medical director of the outpatient geriatric clinic at Sisters Hospital and an internist affiliated with Millard Fillmore Hospital and the Deaconess Hospital. After he retired in the early 1990s, he volunteered his medical services at Geneva B. Scruggs Community Health Center. His daughter, Pamela described him as a "good, hardworking, funny and humble man who loved his family and treated those who went to him for medical care with expertise and loving dedication."

As a medical expert on drug addition, Dr. Murphy served on the Erie County Narcotics Guidance Council and the Mental Hygiene Community Services Board and was often called on to comment, particularly on heroin addition, by the news media.
He was born in San Antonio, Texas and moved to Buffalo with his parents when he was 6 years old. He was a graduate of School 17 and Lafayette High School. As a youth, he was active in St. Philip's Episcopal Church and in sports and the Boy Scouts. He delivered newspapers to help his family financially.

After enrolling at Fisk College in Nashville, Tennessee, where he majored in chemistry and excelled at varsity football and baseball, he worked summers on passenger boats that docked at Buffalo and as a porter on the old New York Central Railroad to earn money for his tuition. Recruited to play for the Negro Professional Baseball League after college, he chose instead to go to Meharry Medical College, also in Nashville. He received a medical degree in the early 1940s and did his internship in a hospital in St. Louis.

Active in the Buffalo community, Murphy served on the boards of the Michigan Avenue YMCA and Baker Hall. He was a life member of the NAACP and the American Lung Association. He was also a member of the National Medical Association and the Upstate Medical Alliance. He also was presented a United Negro College Fund Outstanding Alumnus Award and was a charter member of Alpha Kappa chapter of Sigma Pi Phi fraternity and a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Dr. Murphy was active in his adulthood at Lincoln Memorial United Methodist Church, serving on numerous committees and donating a stained-glass window at the church in honor of his late parents, Benjamin F. and Edith Lawrence Murphy. He enjoyed sports, hunting, fishing and gardening.

He was married to the former Clyde Wilkins Boddie for nearly 56 years. They had two daughters, Pamela and Clyde E. and a son, Benjamin F. III and two grandchildren.

Dr. Murphy died on February 13, 2000 and is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery.