Homegrown author takes deep dive into art of communication amid divisiveness

by Charles Cassady

Headlines and pundits paint a bleak picture of 2021 USA, as a country split between red and blue zones, between stubborn political parties living in separate realities, “alternative facts,” online deepfakes and dueling conspiracy theories on everything.

Author, editor and blogger David Murray, who grew up in Hudson, addresses the syndrome in a new book. Still, he is not about to call the polarization so shocking.

“Show me the time in this country when discourse wasn’t in real trouble, and I’ll show you a time when discourse was stifled – like in the 1950s,” he said.

“I think a lot of people groan at the title of my book, ‘An Effort to Understand.’ And I, effortlessly, understand. It’s about communication – not just with people who you disagree with politically, but with yourself. It’s about connecting with other human beings by overcoming or acknowledging your own vanity, self-righteousness and meanness, to understand how others from so many walks of life make the same mistakes, and share the same virtues, too.”

The Chicago-based Murray appeared in an early May online presentation under the auspices of the Hudson Library & Historical Society, discussing “An Effort to Understand.” It was a virtual homecoming for Murray, whose parents, Thomas Murray and Carol Calloway, arrived in Hudson in the 1970s.

“My dad was the creative director for Campbell-Ewald in Detroit, in the 1960s, best known for serving as GM’s ad agency of record,” he said. “One of their clients was Firestone, which was growing tired of having the account execs look at their watches on visits to Akron, hoping to catch the next plane home. 

“They told my dad if he took a few crack staffers and started a small agency in the area, he could have the Firestone account, which was massive at that time. My dad opened Murray & Chaney Advertising in Turner’s Mill, in 1971, bringing me, and my mother, then pregnant with my sister, to Hudson.”

Family ties to the advertising world (Carol became a copywriter as well, and later a novelist) led Murray to publish his first book, 2014’s “Raised by Mad Men.” The premier work was inspired by his late father’s distaste for AMC’s “Mad Men” peddling a sensationalized cable-TV-drama view of marketing communications in a bygone era.

Murray called himself a “mediocre student” in Hudson (only slightly better in Kent State University) but added, “I had kind of an amazing number of great teachers in Hudson High School – mostly in history and English – that inspired me to take real interest in both subjects.

“Mrs. [Mary] Greer, my freshman English teacher, handed a paper back to me and casually told me I could maybe think about being a writer when I grew up, the first time anyone other than my writer-parents said such a thing to me. And maybe the first person including my writer-parents,” he said. “She showed me the world was a lot bigger than Hudson, Ohio.”

Thus, David Murray relocated to Chicago. “My leading Chicago literary inspiration was Studs Terkel, whose book `Working,’ and whose basic enthusiastic love of human beings, changed my life.”

Said Murray, “My parents were great communicators, but pretty reserved and a little aloof. Studs, a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, could sit down with an oil-company CEO, ask him about his work and sincerely believe he’d get something true and humane and wise, even out of a guy like that.”

Other Third Coast writing muses included Alex Kotlowitz, Mike Royko, Chicago’s tradition of muckraking newspaper reportage, wealth/poverty gaps and political upheavals.

“I think my book is full of their influence,” Murray analyzed. “I’m no tough guy, like Nelson Algren or Mike Royko. But my writing is tougher for living in this city, under their influence. I swallowed Chicago whole, and vice-versa. My dad used to tease me, calling me ‘my only child born on the South Side of Chicago.’”

Although he tried advertising and felt it less appealing than his father had, Murray, after years of freelance journalism, found another use for persuasive words. He now edits “Vital Speeches of the Day,” founded in 1934, a journal that reflects public opinion through important, influential and prominent oratory. Murray also lead the Professional Speechwriters Association, which “has been around since 2013, when I founded it at the request of several of the perhaps 1,000 human beings on the planet Earth who call themselves full-time professional speechwriters.”

“They work for heads of state, corporate CEOs, heads of huge nonprofits,” he said. “They are often the only people in their huge organization who does what they do. …It’s a tiny association, but as one of its most prominent members describes ‘a close-knit group of loners.’”

For “An Effort to Understand,” which is subtitled “Hearing one another (and ourselves) in a nation cracked in half,” Murray compiled essays and opinion on the art of declamation, erudition and argument, applied in a seemingly dysfunctional, disrupted nation. “American Patriots Don’t Call Their Fellow Americans Nasty Names” goes one of his headings. He cites examples of Robert Kennedy, Barack Obama, Rahm Emmanuel, David Packard (of Hewlett-Packard), Clinton White House speechwriter David Kusnet and, of course, his father, in ruminations on how to establish dialogue, listen and respond with egalitarianism and avoid such pitfalls as “civility” (“Civility,” he explains, “is a cold civil war”).

“I’ve been writing the essays that appear in ‘Effort’ since before Obama was elected, on my blog [writing-boots.com],” Murray said. “The book is a carefully edited collection of those essays, all on and around the theme of how can better communication make a better world?

“As the Trump administration drew to a close, it seemed high time to read more than 3,000 essays I’ve written on communication and find the ones most apropos of this urgent American moment. I was relieved to find about 60 that really spoke to this time.”

“An Effort to Understand,” available on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble and other major outlets, earned praise from Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus. And, one must assume, Mrs. Greer.

“I’ve connected with Mrs. Greer since the book came out,” he said. “I told her I remember a Pete Seeger concert poster in her room and another poster that said, ‘It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.’”∞