BIO

Cleo W. Murdoch  was the fulltime principal and teacher for the Dunbar School from 1926 until 1940, and enrolled during the summers at Arizona State Teachers College (ASTC), starting in 1929.  She took education courses to match her earlier work at an “Historically Black College”—Western University, in Kansas City, and Emporia State Teachers college in the same state. 

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Much of Ms. Cleo's history is becoming clearer, due to census reports, ancestry records, and oral histories.  In addition, the local paper and the student newspaper, The Pine—forerunner of the Lumberjack--includes mention of Cleo Murdoch and the Dunbar School.  NAU’s archives contain photos and documents provided by one of its most famous lumberjacks, Wilson Riles—who donated an entire scrapbook of pictures and memorabilia from his decades in Flagstaff.

 

Scouring the student newspaper and the annual yearbook uncovers one article—when Mrs. Murdock (sometimes her name was spelled with a “k”) spoke on “Negro Relations” at a local church in March 1939.  Neighborhood directories document her residences on Milton Street in 1929, and then on S. Leroux in 1939, but none of the yearbooks include pictures or listings of Ms. Cleo or her school work.  When she suffered a stroke and then a sudden heart attack in May 1940, her obituary counts her husband George Murdock as a resident of Winslow, and that her parents and relatives lived there too.  She is buried in a plot next to Mr George H. Hartman--her uncle--in Desert View Cemetery, Winslow AZ.

 

She lived an incredibly full life: Graduating from Winslow High in 1920, teaching school in Kansas for four years before marrying and moving to Flagstaff.  She single-handedly taught First through Eighth at Dunbar School—and oral histories reveal she was a no-nonsense principal.