Jim Murray, who was the general manager of the Philadelphia Eagles when the team reached the Super Bowl in 1981, and who also helped found the first Ronald McDonald House to aid the families of seriously ill children, died on Monday at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 87.
The Eagles announced the death but did not cite a cause.
Mr. Murray, who had a background in public relations, was general manager of the Eagles from 1974 to 1983 and helped revive the team’s fortunes after years of losing. But it was in his role as a kind of charitable entrepreneur that Mr. Murray achieved the most renown in his native Philadelphia.
He helped start Ronald McDonald House Charities, now an organization with more than 385 facilities, mostly in the United States but also in some 60 other countries, designed to provide accommodations and other resources near medical centers for families with children battling cancer and other serious illnesses.
The first facility opened in Philadelphia in 1974, the year Mr. Murray became, at 36, the National Football League’s youngest general manager. The daughter of Fred Hill, a tight end with the Eagles, had been diagnosed with leukemia. The team raised money for her; Mr. Murray was delegated to prolong the giving by looking for a related charitable cause.
He found a local pediatric oncologist, Dr. Audrey Evans, who told him that the most pressing need was to provide accommodation for families who brought their sick children to a hospital and often had to sleep in the corridor or in their cars.
Mr. Murray understood immediately. “He saw the way they were struggling and said, ‘We have to figure something out,’” his godson, the Philadelphia sports broadcaster Rob Ellis, said in an interview. “Then the idea bloomed and progressed. It started with the motivation to help his player.”
Mr. Murray reached out to a Philadelphia advertising executive who handled the region’s McDonald’s account. Local McDonald’s restaurants agreed to donate money from a promotional drink — the Shamrock Shake — as long as the house could be named after the company’s emblematic clown.
The first Ronald McDonald House opened on Oct. 15, 1974, at 4032 Spruce Street in Philadelphia. There was room for seven families. Mr. Murray took to calling it the “McMiracle.”
Dr. Evans died in 2022 at 97.
“When Dr. Evans challenged me to get a house, she didn’t want a house, she wanted a room at the Y.M.C.A.,” Mr. Murray recalled in a 2019 video interview with the Philadelphia public-access channel MLTV-Main Line Network. “I said no, this is Philly. You want a house, we’ll get us a house. Thank God I called McDonald’s.”
Mr. Murray’s other Philadelphia accomplishment was his resurrection (albeit temporary) of the moribund Eagles, a team that had no winning seasons between 1966 and 1978.
In 1976, he persuaded the team’s erratic trucking-magnate owner, Leonard Tose, to hire Dick Vermeil, the winning head football coach at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mr. Vermeil brought in top players, and by 1978, the Eagles had reached the playoffs.
The team reached the Super Bowl in 1981, only to lose to the Oakland Raiders, 27-10. The Eagles, Mr. Murray later said of that game, “peaked at the national anthem.”
Mr. Vermeil resigned in 1982, citing burnout, and the next year Mr. Murray was fired by Mr. Tose and his daughter Susan Fletcher, the team’s vice president, in a cost-cutting move that reflected the team’s parlous financial state, which had been brought on largely by the owner’s gambling addiction.
By the time he sold the team two years later, Mr. Tose had racked up more than $25 million in gambling debts. He wound up living in a downtown hotel, where, Mr. Ellis said, Mr. Murray and others supported him financially.
Mr. Murray’s “entire life was about service to his fellow man and trying in every way, shape or form to help people,” Mr. Ellis said.
James Joseph Murray was born in West Philadelphia on June 5, 1938, one of four children of Jim Murray, a food services worker at the University of Pennsylvania, and Mary (Kelly) Murray.
He attended parochial schools throughout his childhood and briefly attended a seminary before graduating in 1956 from West Catholic High School. In the 2019 interview, he recalled that the Irish Catholic neighborhood where he grew up was impoverished, but mutual solidarity prevailed.
“We were poorer than poor but richer than rich,” he said. “The point is, people took care of each other.”
At Villanova University, where he graduated in 1960 with a bachelor’s degree in English, he served as manager of the baseball team. He subsequently worked in management for minor league baseball teams and served in the Marine Corps Reserve.
He returned to Philadelphia to become sports information director at Villanova in 1966, and three years later joined the Eagles’ public relations office.
In the years after his tenure with the team, he founded a public relations and sports marketing firm and continued his involvement with the Ronald McDonald Houses.
He married Dianne Harrison in 1967. She survives him, as do two daughters, Karin Davidson and Amy Murray; three sons, Jimmy IV, Brian and John Paul; a brother, Francis; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Murray, Ronald McDonald House Charities said in a news release, was “a man of deep faith and relentless compassion.”
In 2019, he himself put it a little differently.
Founding the charity, he said, was no more than “putting people together that can hold hands, hold hearts and say, you know what, we’re on defense, but you can’t win without a good defense.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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