Upper Darby woman with food pantry at her house garners accolades and invite from Dr. Oz

To Desiree’ LaMarr-Murphy, it seems that all people want to do these days is thank her, praise her, and send her money.

“It gets overwhelming,” said the Upper Darby widowed mother of five daughters who is perhaps the only person in the area who runs a food pantry out of her own home.

After a story about her appeared in the Feb. 11 Inquirer, readers and TV news viewers from South Carolina to California learned the tale of a person who suffered through a lack of food as a child and a young woman, then vowed to grapple with hunger ever since.

» READ MORE: Hungry as a child, this Philadelphia woman now uses her own house as a food pantry

“All the attention from the article was too much at first,” said LaMarr-Murphy, 43, a special-needs coordinator for the School District of Philadelphia. “I cried. A person from Nigeria called for advice on how to run a pantry like mine. A podcast in Virginia wants to use me as a symbol of hope. And we raised more than $7,000.

“After all that, I just want to stay humble.”

That could be difficult.

LaMarr-Murphy will be taping an appearance on The Dr. Oz Show Thursday that’s scheduled to air on Fox 29-WTXF at 1 p.m., April 24. Folks from The Rachael Ray Show also came calling, but LaMarr-Murphy was already committed.

In a statement, producers of the Dr. Oz program, which focuses on health, among other topics, said: “We wanted to highlight Desiree’ because we thought it was a selfless act for her to give up her time to pioneer for people who are food insecure, without asking anything in return.

“We also thought that as someone who lived through food insecurity, she had a genuine connection to the needs of people going through these problems right now, especially as the pandemic continues.”

On the show, LaMarr-Murphy said, she’ll talk about why it’s important to continue her work, why she’s so committed, and how, as both a child and an adult, she faced food insecurity.

Growing up without enough food in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Wynnefield, she remembers having cereal and Oodles of Noodles for dinner, as well as pancakes made without pancake mix. LaMarr-Murphy would enviously watch The Cosby Show, in which the well-dressed characters lived cohesive, loving lives, with plenty to eat.

“How come,” she’d ask herself, “I don’t have that?”

She’d sit without lunch in the cafeteria of the former William B. Mann Elementary School (now Mastery Charter Mann Elementary), watching other kids eat pizza and chicken nuggets.

In those days, anyone needing free school lunch had to turn in paperwork that LaMarr-Murphy didn’t know how to fill out. She didn’t want to distress anyone in her family about it, so she never mentioned her lack of noontime meals. “And at school, no adult ever asked what was wrong,” LaMarr-Murphy added.

When she was 23, a fire destroyed her home, and LaMarr-Murphy, by then a parent, received food donations that included rancid produce.

She used the food-less lunch periods and the after-fire charity to forge herself into a hunger fighter. LaMarr-Murphy calls that kind of development “post-traumatic growth.”

After becoming a special-ed teacher, LaMarr-Murphy learned how hungry her students were. She would bring in food for the kids, her empty-stomach lunchtimes never diminished in her memory.

Soon afterward, she started pantries, connecting with Philabundance, the hunger-relief agency, to stock the shelves in some of them. She opened her so-called Murphy’s Markets at Richard Wright Elementary School in North Philadelphia and at Mitchell Elementary School in Southwest Philadelphia.

LaMarr-Murphy also distributes food at several other locations in the area, though none more unique than her own home. Her husband, Christopher Murphy, died of a pulmonary embolism at age 39 in 2016.

She created the network of food donors for the pantry herself, and stores some of the supplies in the 550-square-foot building she calls her “she-shed” in the backyard of her two-story house in a middle-class neighborhood of Upper Darby.

Since the article about her appeared, LaMarr-Murphy said that foot traffic to her home has increased. And growing numbers of people tell her their own stories of food insecurity.

“People want to be talked to and heard, not just handed some food,” LaMarr-Murphy said.

Lorre Jones, CEO of Philabundance, said that people who are hearing about LaMarr-Murphy for the first time are discovering what Jones already knew: “She is an impressive woman with an inspiring story. People are now mentioning her commitment, her tenacity.”

What’s also important, Jones added, is that LaMarr-Murphy is telling others that food insecurity can happen to anyone, a lesson being painfully learned during the pandemic as more Americans lose their jobs and descend into hard times.

“All the people Desiree’ has touched are saying that we shouldn’t simply assume that people did something wrong to become food insecure,” she said.

Meanwhile, as LaMarr-Murphy readies herself for her national television debut, she joked that she’s suddenly become “famous.”

But, she added, quickly turning serious, “We can’t forget that poverty is all around us.” LaMarr-Murphy stressed that she didn’t “look poor” growing up, “with my nice clothes and my hair done. The face of poverty and food insecurity can be different than you think it should be.

“It’s important we listen to what people have been through.”