5th Avenue during Hurricane Gloria in 1985

We’d like to thank Thomas Pickerel for sharing this story.

There we were, in NYC on the morning of September 26th, 1985, walking up Fifth Avenue, near the Trump Tower, when my buddy said, ¨Hey, there´s Bill Murray, signing an autograph for a cop¨ and, sure enough, there he was.

My buddy and I were on the way to Europe, from Seattle, and we were visiting New York for the first time. Hurricane Gloria was about to arrive, and it was raining pretty hard as we carried our backpacks from the Port Authority, over to 5th, and up towards a friends place on the Upper East side where we were planning to stay.

Bill looked a bit rough, he was wearing one of those shiny acetate 80´s jackets, a sleeve was torn, and he was wearing sweats. Coming from Seattle, we were craving espresso, and thought it would be nice to invite Bill for a coffee. He was super friendly; he signed my Manhattan street map, over Central Park.

Ghost Busters mania was in full swing, but I had really liked Bills work in the movie ¨The Razor´s Edge¨, and, wanting to encourage more of this type of work, I told him how much I had liked it. He probably had been dealing with a ton of Ghost Busters fans, and he looked at me with a sort of curious eyebrow lift, and said ¨Thanks, thanks a lot, man! ¨

We asked him if he would like to have an espresso with us, and he was sort of dumbfounded. The coffee craze, Starbucks, that whole world had not arrived yet in NYC. He politely declined, saying he had to meet some people. We asked him where we could find an espresso, and he had to think a bit, and told us we could probably get one at the St Regis Hotel, nearby. We shook hands, and he walked off in the rain.