By Bill Forry

When Fran Murphy's gone - please God, many years from now - what will become of Dorchester's Memorial Day?

It's a question that keeps guys like Billy Wright up for a few long minutes at night. Wright's the commander at the Old Dorchester Post in Adams Corner - "the ODP" to most of us - and this year he's the chief marshal of the oldest and most revered Memorial Day observance in the city.

But Billy Wright will be the first to tell you: None of it would come off without Dr. Murphy, a retired schoolteacher and WWII Navy man who's been organizing Memorial Day in these parts since the Eisenhower administration.

"He's Mr. Memorial Day," Wright says, not even half-joking. "I don't know what we'd do without him."

Above, right: Francis Murphy in 2002 at the Cedar Grove cemetery ceremony he has overseen for the last half-decade.

Whatever we do when that sad day comes, it won't ever be the same.

This week, Wright and Murphy were around the table at the ODP, going over details of the upcoming May 31 parade. They've lined up an old St. Mark's boy turned Navy SEAL named Mike Walsh to be the speaker at Cedar Grove Cemetery. Walsh retired as a lieutenant commander from the US Navy back in 1993 and wrote a book about his career, much of it focusing on his five tours in Vietnam. More on him next week.

Right now, Murphy and Wright are busy with preparations for the last day in May: calling Captain Tom Lee at C-11 to make sure some police sawhorses will be on hand to block off the road in front of the ODP so the Massachusetts National Guard's Air Force Band can play without getting sideswiped. Finalizing the commemorative booklet that Dave Collins will print up at Royal Print on Neponset Ave. Making sure the wreaths get ordered from the florists on Adams Street.

The real work for Wright and his members will come in the days just before Memorial Day. They'll decorate 34 "hero squares" across the neighborhood - intersections that are named for Dorchester kids who gave their last full measure in the Pacific, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Then, it's on to Cedar Grove Cemetery, where little American flags will be planted at some 900 graves, including that of Sgt. Danny Londono, killed back in March near Baghdad.

Londono will be on the minds of many of us this year- and so to will be the men and women of Fran Murphy's "Greatest Generation," who'll finally have their own monument unveiled on the Mall in Washington D.C. this Memorial Day. In honor of the occasion, Dorchester's vets have dedicated their Memorial Day exercises to WWII vets.

The parade itself - and the solemn ceremonies that will follow at Cedar Grove - aren't the same chore they used to be. Now 1958, that was a real undertaking. Dot was still flush with GI-Billers then, and the baby boom was on, filling up the neighborhood's old Irish battleships, the apt euphemism for our ubiquitous three-deckers. Dorchester was choking with a population that teetered damn near 200,000, double its size today.

That year, Murphy was the point man for the grandest Memorial Day parade this town's ever seen. He flew down to Washington to meet with the neighborhood's congressman, John W. McCormack, who made sure Murphy and his brothers-in-arms got the right doors opened for them in the capitol. A certain lanky Navy hero and U.S. senator was due to headline the year's festivities - and McCormack knew as well as anyone that it had to be a show. Kennedy was to kick off his campaign for president in a few months and Dorchester's Memorial Day was a great opportunity to shine up the shoes and activate the base. There was even talk that Kennedy's Cedar Grove talk would become a major foreign policy speech.

"We had everything that year," Murphy recalls. "We just went in and told (McCormack) what we wanted - and we got it."

McCormack was not yet the Speaker of the House, but the Columbia Road native was already a Capitol Hill legend. He got Murphy face time with the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Randolph McCall Pate, who ordered his mighty Marine Band from Camp Lejune, N.C. to fly to South Weymouth Naval Air Station. Pate even requisitioned his own personal jet for the flight north.

"You men need a real band," Pate barked at Murphy, as he recalls. "This one's tops. It's my corps!"

Months of preparation went into Memorial Day '58, so when it dawned bright and beautiful, Murphy breathed a sigh of relief. The parade was so long that year that the front of the column was rounding the corner at Gallivan Boulevard before the last vets stepped off from Adams Street to start their journey through Lower Mills. Now that's a parade.

Kennedy's people threw Murphy and company a curve ball late in the game. The senator, he was told, "can't make that affair at Cedar Grove." Instead, Kennedy ended up making his big speech to a packed crowd at the Victory Road Armory, much to the chagrin of some of the other Dot posts.

"Give him credit, though," says Fran Murphy. "He made a stop at all of the posts that year."

One of them was the old Lower Mills Post on Washington Street, now long gone. Murphy rode with the future president and watched in stunned silence as he waved to "one of his girlfriends that he had over there."

"He mouthed, 'I'll call you later,'" says Murphy.

So, will the new JFK be making a stop at Cedar Grove this year? If so, it'll be a surprise to everyone. The last Massachusetts man to make a go of it, Mike Dukakis, popped in at the eleventh hour. Two days notice is what Fran Murphy got for that 1988 visit. The place was crawling with Secret Service. One of them posed as a new mom, pushing a baby carriage through the cemetery. Except that was no baby in there - it was a sub-machine gun.

If Team Kerry does decide to make a local stop on May 31, you'd better believe that Mr. Memorial Day, Francis Murphy, will be the first to know.