‘Anything and everything for everyone’: HTMS head custodian preserves and inspires

Jeff Murphree said he’d send a photo of his office to provide a visual of the things he’s saved over the years, to get a feel for his affinity for the past.

He sent 22.

Murphree is the head custodian at Hewitt-Trussville Middle School, a career that started in the 1980s as a student at what was then Hewitt-Trussville High School. The 1987 graduate, sans a year teaching at Snow Rogers Elementary School and a while working at BellSouth, has spent a career inside the school building on Trussville-Clay Road, learning, fixing, collecting.

“He is very thrifty, he generally won’t throw things out if he believes they can be used at a later time or have some type of historic value,” said Cahaba Elementary School head custodian Tony Gagliano. “He loves doing electrical and maintenance type projects. He knows the middle school building from end to end. He can tell you about all the mechanical and electrical components of that building.”

Murphree started as a student custodian at what was then Hewitt-Trussville High School just to help. He started getting checks. He was offered benefits. He made more than $7 per hour and worked through college at UAB, where he earned a degree in elementary education. Teaching elementary school, and subsequently at BellSouth, were not for him. Bill Hamilton, then the principal at Hewitt-Trussville High School, hired him back as head custodian in 2000. He’s been there since.

“I get to fix things, and I get to do stuff that no one else does,” Murphree said.

In June, he was preparing to install emergency lights in the catwalk at the school’s auditorium. He is the head custodian, but he also handles wiring, plumbing, painting and more. If he were a baseball player, he would be a five-tool star.

“He has a servant heart, but he’s not overt about it,” said Hewitt-Trussville Middle School Principal Jennifer Abney, who met Murphree more than a decade ago when she was hired by Trussville City Schools. “His way of showing that he cares about you or that he loves you is by some sort of action or by him doing something at school. He just does anything and everything for everyone.”

Abney said Murphree works closely with the Facilities and Support Services department because he can “fix or build anything, and I mean anything.”

“I think one of the reasons that this building is in the pristine shape that it is still in is mainly due to Jeff Murphree,” Abney said. “He’s been there, I believe, 33 years. He knows that building inside, outside, upside down and inside out. If there is some kind of information that is needed for the building, he knows it off the top of his head.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Abney was trying to determine what the maximum capacity was for the middle school gym, so that the 50% capacity restriction could be followed. Murphree knew it off the top of his head. Not only does Murphree know the building, he tries to save relics of Trussville’s past.

“That’s not always the mentality of people nowadays,” Abney said. “We kind of live in a throw-away society, and we’ll just get something new. Jeff does not operate that way, and I appreciate that in him because he’ll fix something so we don’t have to waste our money on buying something new.”

Murphree has donated multiple artifacts — a 100-year-old concrete lintel, the scoreboard inside the original Hewitt High School gym, school registers from the 1920s and 1930s — to the Trussville Historical Museum.

The lintel and scoreboard are well-known artifacts to people who go back to one-stoplight Trussville. The school registers might not be as familiar.

“The office was cleaning out old files and junk that was moved from the 1938 school to here,” Murphree said of the move from the original Hewitt High (now Cahaba Elementary) to the next Hewitt-Trussville High (now Hewitt-Trussville Middle) in 1984. “They threw away a pile of old school registers and I couldn’t bear to throw the oldest ones away, so I saved the 1920s ones and some 1930s ones, I think. I kept them at home for decades and one day decided that they needed to go to where they would be appreciated, so I donated them to the Historical Society. Those are very interesting to look at because it lists all the parents and their occupations as well as things going on at the school, such as a new flag or flagpole being purchased and other neat day-to-day things.”

Murphree volunteers at the Heart of Dixie Railroad Museum in Calera. He arranges displays, changes light bulbs, cleans and documents artifacts.

“I just do a little bit of everything,” he said.

In his free time, he enjoys walking through the alleys of downtown Birmingham, checking out old advertising signs and old storefronts.

“I like old buildings and old stuff,” Murphree said. “My house is full of nothing but old stuff.”

When the former Hewitt-Trussville Middle building — now Cahaba Elementary — closed in 2008, Murphree went through it, the cabinets and light fixtures and bookshelves. His goal was to preserve parts of its history.

“He also has other items like yearbooks and old pictures from this building,” Gagliano said. “He truly loves these schools and works to keep old memories of them alive.”

Murphree said he also has an aerial photo of that historic building that includes Jack Wood Stadium, which was demolished in 2015. He remembered telling folks back then that those photos, those memories, should not be destroyed.

“I said, ‘I’m taking these. They don’t need to be destroyed. If you want them back, you know where they’ll be,’” Murphree said.

They’re hanging in his office today, appearing in two of the 22 photos he sent.

“It means something to me,” Murphree said. “It may not mean anything to anybody else, but when I’m gone, they can do whatever they want to. If you look at something and it has value to you, and looks like somebody in the future may care about it, don’t get rid of it.”

He configures the window displays outside the middle school library. They reflect the season and even have flashing lights and, sometimes, animatronic figures. Abney said she has gotten to know Murphree personally and thinks the world of him.

“I think he just sees the value in what we have, and respects and cherishes all things old,” Abney said. “It’s unbelievable. He cares about the people in that building, and he will do anything for any teacher or student in that building.”

Of those 22 photos Murphree sent, there are the two of the original high school; many of books, plates and cafeteria trays; Hewitt-Trussville-themed signs; the Ned Paine Awards that Murphree won for outstanding school service from 1985 to 1987; and one cat-themed calendar. But there are also two photos of a pencil sharpener screwed into a block of wood.

On the back of that block of wood are Murphree’s name and a date, Sept. 1, 1987. Sometime after he graduated in 1987, Murphree wrote on this wood block for one of the classrooms that didn’t have a pencil sharpener. These days, electric pencil sharpeners are used and, more, often, mechanical pencils. A few years ago, Murphree took the pencil sharpener and wood block from that classroom and saved it. It sits on a shelf in his office.

“Doesn’t mean anything to anybody else, but meant something to me, so I saved it,” he said.