Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Tom Murrin retired from Duquesne University this week. The 77-year-old former Westinghouse executive was a professor and business school dean.

By Dan Fitzpatrick, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Legendary football disciplinarian Vince Lombardi was the best boss Thomas Murrin had. And still the only boss he got to knock flat on his ass.

"I remember, as if it were yesterday, facing him for the first time," said the 77-year-old Mr. Murrin, an elder business statesman who retired from teaching this week after a 5 1/2 decade-long run as Westinghouse Electric Corp. executive, U.S. Commerce Department official, business school dean and professor at Duquesne University.

It was coach Lombardi who taught Mr. Murrin how to work hard and believe in himself, and those lessons began in the Bronx that first day in 1947, when Mr. Murrin showed up for college football practice as an inquisitive Scots-Irish kid who took the L train from New York's East Side an hour each way, every day, just so he could attend physics classes at Fordham University, paying for it all with an athletic scholarship.

Years before Mr. Lombardi led the Green Bay Packers to five pro championships, he was a young coach at Fordham, and on this day he crouched down on the defensive side of the ball, without protective padding, and challenged Mr. Murrin, an offensive tackle.

"Block me!" Mr. Lombardi said.

Mr. Murrin, worried about flattening the emotionally unpredictable coach, held back, which made Mr. Lombardi even angrier. "Murrin, if that's the best you can do, I don't think you'll ever start a game for me!"

So Lombardi and Murrin crouched down again.

"I took a deep breath," Mr. Murrin said, and "blocked him really very effectively. He rolled over on his ass and got all fluttered. I thought 'Oh my God, now this is worse than not blocking him.' "

He held his breath as Mr. Lombardi dusted himself off and said, "That's better. Keep that up and you'll be OK."

The son of two immigrants who lost his father at age 14, worked as a teenage elevator operator and stuffed cardboard in his shoes to keep out the winter cold, Mr. Murrin went out into the world as a brawling man with a bright personality, a man who loved telling stories, cussing, drinking and the rough-and-tumble exchange of ideas.

His first job, in 1951, brought him to Pittsburgh and Westinghouse, an industrial powerhouse looking for brainy people it could stick on the factory floor. Mr. Murrin was perfect -- able to talk physics or football and out-drink anyone at the table. At Westinghouse, he moved up the ranks quickly, gaining loyalty from employees and fixing problem businesses, and after 36 years he looked like a probable pick to replace Chief Executive Officer Douglas Danforth in the late 1980s.

But he lost the internal competition to rival John Marous -- largely because he was unable to temper his bare-knuckled personality. But he also knows, rightly or wrongly, that he would not have changed.

"Murrin," he said in an unashamedly reflective and honest appraisal of himself during an interview this week, "was a thick-skulled, occasionally dumb-witted Irish kid from the sidewalks of New York who sometimes was absolutely sure he knew what best ought to be done but it flew in the face of the views and convictions of superior people and so it didn't get done.

"Murrin, in the process, kind of got blackballed," he added. "I was outspoken about a lot of things."

The Wall Street Journal expressed surprise that Mr. Murrin had not been picked -- a newspaper clip Mr. Murrin kept for a while but no longer has. In a number of interviews for a Post-Gazette series on Westinghouse's demise that ran in early 1998, fellow executives and underlings expressed a deep-seated fondness for Mr. Murrin, saying his loss, and the exodus of other top executives upset at his exit, was crucial to the conglomerate's ultimate fate.

Even today, people still insist to Mr. Murrin, in airports, restaurants and on Duquesne's campus, that if he had been appointed CEO, Westinghouse would still exist in its old form, as a Downtown-based conglomerate at 11 Stanwix St., employing tens of thousands in the region. Instead, the old Westinghouse became New York-based CBS, then Viacom, and then just CBS again. (The nuclear energy operations survived as Westinghouse Electric Co., not Corp., under new ownership.)

Mr. Murrin, speaking in his former business school dean's office at Duquesne, where he stepped down as a professor this week, paused and chuckled softly to himself at the thought. "See, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings and a lot of the key people are still alive and they have their own views, obviously, and they may be right. They sure think they are right.

"But I think if we had faced up to some of the realities more meaningfully that were facing Westinghouse at that time, we would have had to make some changes, painful changes. But we would have, I think, survived as a significant company, certainly survived as a significant employer in the region and as a big, big positive to Pittsburgh."

After leaving Westinghouse in 1987, Mr. Murrin served as deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce and Duquesne's business school dean, joined a variety of boards (including the Allegheny County Airport Authority, where he still serves) and for the last six years he taught a popular graduate course at Duquesne that offers "Executive Insights into Contemporary Global Issues."

There was no text for his course, only reams of articles and reports hand-selected by Mr. Murrin, and an impressive list of guest lecturers (former Allegheny County Chief Executive James Roddey, local Rand Corp. director Barry Balmat, Medrad Inc. boss John Friel were among the people to drop by for Mr. Murrin's last semester) offering real-world insight instead of textbook theory.

Mr. Murrin, his gray hair still wavy and slicked back, leaves Duquesne this week on a pair of bad knees -- the result of all that football, recreational racquetball and backyard basketball -- that will require physical therapy if he is to avoid surgery and the risk of a hospital infection, which he worries about.

As he cleaned out his office in Duquesne's Rockwell Hall and attended to some last appointments, Mr. Murrin walked gingerly through the hallways, grabbing door knobs and cabinets to steady himself. He talked proudly of having given up drinking several years ago, for health reasons, and made it clear that he still likes to cuss, tell self-deprecating stories and speak his mind on an array of topics.

At Duquesne, for example, he openly questioned the need for tenure and complained about adjunct professors being treated as "third-class citizens." In the interview this week, he worried openly about the region's ongoing population loss, its slow economic progress and the perception of Pittsburgh as a high-tax, un-competitive area more interested in political protection than economic development.

While he believes Pittsburgh is a "wonderful place" that has a lot to be proud of, "if we don't figure out how to reverse these root cause trends, we ... are going to end up being Toledo with a football team," he said.

Regional leaders, he said, need to be more honest about problems and challenges. He cited some improvements at places such as the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, which once issued announcements that made it sound like "everything is coming up roses. That's nonsense,'' he said, "and that is not the way to solve a problem. That is not the way to get anything done."

In a final address to students and faculty earlier this month, Mr. Murrin, a visitor to 40 countries, stuck to national and global concerns, expressing alarm about Americans' waning interest in science and technology when compared with faster-growing nations such as India and China.

And he said more attention needs to be directed at the world's "have-nots" if the United States is to have lasting influence over global affairs. "Personally," said Mr. Murrin, as students took notes, "I really wish I were young again -- like so many of you --to live in this most opportune, albeit challenging, period in our globe's history."

While preparing for the speech, Mr. Murrin's wife, Dee, asked him not to conclude with the quote from General Douglas MacArthur about how soldiers never die, "they just fade away.'' So Mr. Murrin wrote a different ending, saying instead that "this old professor is very pleased to hobble away on tender football knees -- with many fond memories."