Getting the bends

William Lawrence Murphy (1876 - 1959) was an inventive fellow who was living in San Francisco around the turn of the 20th Century.

In those days, it was considered indecent for a woman to visit a man's bedroom, and he was living in a one-room apartment. What's an eager young swain to do?  How to get his girl to visit?

It's an amazing coincidence that his name was Murphy, because he invented the Murphy Bed!


You don't see these so much anymore, probably because rooms in hotels don't have the ceiling heights that they used to have. They're the beds that fold back into the wall when you're finished "sleeping" so as to give more room for a nice young man and his decent girlfriend to play Parcheesi, make fudge or discuss the great books of the world.

It's the Swiss Army Knife of beds...and I love the concept of something performing two functions.  Such as a little compartment in the back of the SUV where I can hide a set of jumper cables, or a lunch box with a knife and fork hidden in the lid, or a hammer that also doubles as a nutcracker.

OK, that last one was kind of obvious.  But the other great thing about a Murphy Bed, if you still have one, is that there is chance that a comedy movie producer will use your bedroom to film a movie.  The slapstick possibilities are endless when you put some unsuspecting guy in a folding bed, and just when his in-laws show up for dinner, the bed flies up and he gets caught behind the wall while the mother-in-law reminds his wife for the 735th time what a doofus he is, and why she should never have married him...

I've never had a fold-a-bed, and since my beloved Peggy and I are way past the courting stage, approaching our 42nd anniversary, it doesn't look like I'll be trundling down to the bed store anytime soon.

But my one-day dream house will have a Murphy bed, and one of those superwindy hand driers for the Men's room.

And a Men's room.