On this
Veterans Day, my thoughts turn to my father. My dad, Murray Befeler, was born
in New York on November 24, 1913. He
grew up first on a farm in upper New York and then in Brooklyn, the youngest of
seven children. His mother died when he
was about seven and his father remarried.
He dropped out of school in about the tenth grade and lived for awhile
with his brother, my Uncle Jack and his wife, my Aunt Miriam.
I never
knew much about his childhood as he would never talk about it nor his Jewish
heritage. I only met my uncle and aunt
in 1965 when I visited them in Brooklyn on my way back from Europe. Later when I was in Poughkeepsie for a
training class with IBM, I took the train to New York City for a visit. Uncle Jack and Aunt Miriam came to visit us in Long Beach in the
early seventies. I also went to Uncle
Jack’s funeral in about 1983.
My dad
became a photographer and moved as far away from his family as he could, first
to San Francisco and then to Honolulu.
My dad had a very difficult childhood according to Uncle Jack, but I
never learned any particulars.
In
1942 Murray was credited as a base correspondent through the Navy Department
and served as the Honolulu bureau chief for the still photography pool and in
1943 was assigned to the army. He had his home-base in the Star Bulletin
building on Bethel Street. During the
invasion of Iwo Jima my dad played a key role in the history of Joe Rosenthal’s
famous flag raising photograph. While
on Guam he often sent home money he earned by staying sober during the intense
nightly poker games played by the war correspondents.
After
the war was over, he started his own business, Photo Hawaii, which he ran until
his death. .
In 1954
my dad went to the Pacific to do a ten-year-after-the-war photo shoot. When he
returned he had a heart attack, the result of a weakened heart from having
rheumatic fever as a child. From that
time on he came home in the afternoons to rest.
He was an early riser and worked mornings and often had jobs in the
evening as well. He did a lot of work
for United Air Lines, Matson and the Hawaii Visitors Bureau. He often covered arrivals of important people
at the Honolulu airport. He once took
pictures of the Truman family and got a thank you letter from Margaret Truman. He later did a lot of aerial shots of
Honolulu from a helicopter.
In 1968
he had another heart attack and couldn’t come to our wedding when my wife and I
were married. He died in August of
1968. At his funeral a huge crowd turned
out to pay him tribute. I flew his ashes
out to sea in a helicopter and dropped them into the Pacific.
My dad always wanted the best for
me. Because of his heart condition, he couldn’t play sports, but he watched me
play tennis. He paid my way through
Stanford, but then said that was enough education, so I was on my own for my
MBA.
He had
very high ethical standards. He was
honest and told the truth. One time when
someone telephoned whom he didn’t want to talk to, he said to tell them he was
out and he went into the yard.
He
tended to be outspoken and said what he believed.
He was extremely intelligent,
even though he had little formal education.
He told puns such as when viewing a lava flow saying, “isn’t that
lavaly.”
My dad was a creative
photographer, and I’m looking at some of his pictures on the wall as I’m
writing. Last night I watched a program on PBS about Iwo Jima. I took out a
book I had saved titled Immortal Images
by Tedd Thomey. It quoted Joe Rosenthal about the famous flag raising photograph:
“If the fact that I took this picture is important, then I deem it important to
recognize the part played in the handling of it by many people. At Guam the
picture-pool coordinator, Murray Befeler, had to see that my films were
processed. The darkroom men had to do their job well to get good negative
results. The censor had to pass the picture and Murray had to decide it was
good enough to be scheduled via radiophoto, or it would have been passed over
and been nothing but a piece of film.”
