Marin Magazine - July 2018

B R A D M A N G I N

In Marin / FYI

CALLING BRIAN MURPHY affable is like calling Fred Astaire grace- ful. On his morning sports talk show on KNBR that he co-hosts with San Rafael resident Paul McCaffrey, Murphy charms his audience with deep knowledge and sly wit. He has the Irish gift of gab in spades, chatting about everything from the latest Giants game to pop culture to the Twitter trend of the moment.

And, most endearing to local folks, he talks
about growing up in Marin (Murphy speaks
fondly of “the mean streets of Mill Valley”). He
went to elementary, middle and high school
Sporting Life
A morning radio host talks about how he got started
in the business, his most-famous interview and why
he loves Mill Valley. BY ALICE KAUFMAN
from the era of the Rita Abrams song about
the town — the 1960s and ’70s — through the
mid-’80s. Now he is living in Mill Valley again,
this time as a husband and father.

Murphy’s Mill Valley roots run deep. His parents moved from Oakland, where his father was finishing law school at Boalt Hall, to Reed Street in Mill Valley in 1961. “A colleague told my dad he had visited a little town called Mill Valley over the weekend, and that it looked like a wonderful place to raise a family. Dad had never heard of it. He and Mom went to Mountain View High School — Marin to them was a hidden place, a place for people with summer houses.

When they went to visit, they agreed, ‘ This is it.’
I owe it all to that conversation.”
When Murphy’s older brother Kevin was
born, the family moved to a bigger house on East
Blithedale, and after Katie and Brian were born
(he in 1967), the family moved to Enchanted
Knolls. Murphy’s mother still lives there.

As for Brian and his wife, Candace,
when they first were married, they lived in
Montclair, “the Mill Valley of the East Bay.”
Candace didn’t want to live in Mill Valley:
“She said she didn’t want to re-create my
childhood, and I could understand that.”
That all changed one spring night in 2010
when their son Declan was two-and-a-half
and Candace and Brian had dinner with his
parents at D’Angelo’s. After dinner, they sat
and talked in the plaza, and “I guess the magic
overwhelmed her,” Brian recalls. “She looked
at me and said, ‘OK, I get it.’ And we moved
to a house up the hill in Mill Valley, not in my
childhood neighborhood.”
Why Mill Valley? “There are practical
and ethereal reasons,” he says. “Practically,
it’s a no-brainer. First of all, Mill Valley has
what every family looks for — a sound public
school system; Mill Valley checks that box in
a big way. Plus Mill Valley is safe and secure.”
Murphy commutes to his 6-to-10-a.m.
“Murph & Mac” radio show five days a week,
so proximity to San Francisco is another plus.
“Then there are the ethereal reasons that
I share with everyone who has fallen in love
with southern Marin. It’s not just the over-
whelming natural beauty, but how that beauty
is incorporated in your life. It feeds your soul.
The silhouette of Mount Tam grounds you.”
Growing up here, “we all had such a
special experience,” he adds. “To raise kids
to experience that too is a wonderful opportu-
nity indeed.”
Murphy had a love for Marin early, first as a
student at Alton School, now Edna Maguire (“I
walked there from third grade on”), then at Mill