Tommye Sue Murphy was born in Meridian, Mississippi on December 27, 1942 and moved with her family to Oak Ridge, Tennessee as a baby where her father John Goodwin Byrd worked in the Nuclear Plant there during the last years of World War II. Her mother, Lena Williamson Byrd, worked with disabled children, and Tommye Sue and her brother John attended Oak Ridge High School. Tommye Sue studied painting and sculpture as both an undergraduate and graduate student at The University of Georgia then lived for several years in Wilmington, N.C. , teaching at Wilmington College and meeting her husband Bob who was home visiting his parents one summer. They married in a Chapel in Wilmington and moved to New York with dreams as artists, Bob being a poet. The South called and they returned here to Northeast Georgia to teach. Both of them first in Hart County and then Tommye Sue at Franklin County High School. Enabling students to discover their own capacities to find beauty in the world around them, to endow them with a sense of their own vision, was part of her love and belief in others' dignity and goodness. Teaching art was a passion and she was alive and every person and thing came to life within the circle of that classroom. She made with love and intelligence more things than can be listed: paintings, bronze sculptures, a green-paper diamond kite with a 12 foot tail, a rotating paper mobile for her children's crib, a gazebo, and helped design her beloved fine arts building on that hill at FCHS. She was wonder-struck and delighted by the beauty that surrounded her everywhere, and helped those around her renew daily their reverence for the natural world and simple pleasure at being in it. She was lucky in friend and student and she loved them as so many loved her. Music moved her, bridge infuriated her partners, she held many world records as the world's slowest eater, and managed to raise with perfect care and love two grateful children along the way, Anna and Paul.
Funeral services will be held 1:00 p.m. Friday, June 12, 2009 at the Lavonia First Baptist Church with Rev. Richard Bielski and Mr. Paul Murphy officiating. Burial will follow in the Lavonia City Cemetery. The family will receive friends at the funeral home Thursday evening from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Flowers are optional or memorials may be made to Franklin County High School Art Department 6570 GA Hwy 145 Carnesville, GA 30521.