Adele (Sansom) McMurphy

Adele (Sansom) McMurphy, oldest of five siblings, went to Normal School in Victoria. She came to the Yukon in 1918, first to Whitehorse and then to Carmacks to teach school for two winters, then moved to Carcross School.

It was there that she met Jack McMurphy (1901-1970), who had walked from Telegraph Creek to Carcross to be with his parents in 1917. Jack was a mail runner for Louise Schultz in Atlin, B.C., using a dog team in the winter. He also worked for the White Pass on the rail line crew.

Adele and Jack were married in 1930 and raised five children. Daughter Margaret, born in 1931, married Bill Maruk and they had six children. Daughter Millie, born in 1932, married Don Jones and they had four children. Son Leonard (Sonny), born in 1936, married Joan and they had five children. Daughter Dolly, born 1944, married and had three children including a set of twin boys. Youngest daughter, Tina, born in 1948, married Russ Devine, and they had two children.

 In 1935, the family moved to Bennett where Jack worked for White Pass. They moved back to Carcross in 1937 so the children could go to school. From 1939 to 1942, the family lived in the Carcross Hotel. With the building of the Alaska Highway, the road construction crew arrived in Carcross and took over the hotel and the train depot so the family had to find other accommodation.

Daughter Dolly contracted polio in 1953 and had to go to Vancouver at a cost of $16.00 per day for hospital care. Adele

went to work in the train station as an agent for White Pass in 1954 and worked there for seventeen years. She manned three separate phones: the public town phone as it was the only phone in Carcross, the White Pass dispatch phone and the administration phone. They lived upstairs in the depot with the two youngest daughters.

After Jack’s death, Adele moved to Whitehorse and lived in the Alexander Street Residence. One night she was having a snack before going to bed when a deranged man got into her apartment and accused her of being a Russian spy. He took a knife and cut her neck. Fortunately, her friend Helen Basaraba, who was out in the hall, came to her rescue. Both women who were cut, but not critically, survived the ordeal.

Adele passed away in 1980. As a tribute to their mother and her great cooking skills, the family did a special cookbook of her recipes with Yukon artist Ted Harrison providing sketches for the cover.

Adele, trained as a teacher, started something of a dynasty of teachers. There have been seven (7) in the family to date.