[1] At 17, she spent a year in Fremont, Nebraska, studying to be a typist, bookkeeper, filing clerk, shorthand writer, and business administrator.
[citation needed] She arrived in Vancouver in 1912 and found work as a secretary and bookkeeper for The Chanook, which was published by George Murray.
The Murrays also launched various lesser known publications including Country Life In British Columbia, a popular magazine for rural women, and The Chinook, which was George's first venture upon his coming to BC from Ottawa, where he had worked as junior columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and apprenticed in politics under Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
George, already a bright, articulate and somewhat visionary star in the BC Liberal Party, was a popular MLA from his arrival in Lillooet until his electoral demise in 1941.
Faced with a disappeared revenue stream for their paper and George without a seat in the House, they took the decision to move to Alaska.
The account of this experience in The Newspapering Murrays vividly documents the wild times and of that instant boomtown at its birth, and exposes much of the material waste that went into the U.S. military's building of the highway.
George died in 1961, but Ma survived him by 21 years, and continued to run and publish the paper after his death - and to raise eyebrows with her editorials, and laughter with her speeches and frank opinions.