Murray was born March 8 1918 in the Bronx to Herbert and Bessie(nee Solinger) Friedman. He was an only child who was a quick learner. Herbert was an optician and merchandised lenses for vision correction. He excelled at school and under the taut direction of his mother he entered college at the prodigious age of fourteen. Unfortunately his first major was craps and needed a second go around at college but still managed to graduate from Long Island University at the age of 17 BS. He then went into a second B.S. Program in optics at Columbia University which qualified him as an optometrist licensed by the State of New York on the eve of American involvement in WW 2. He was drafted into the Army and landed at the Plattsburg Barracks which is in the extreme north of New York State. He was assigned to optimetric duties in addition to all the other obligations of enlisted men which included weathering the winter in an unheated tent. His best friend in life George Metz,M.D.,a Jewish Edinburgh Medical School graduate, took him under his protective wing, he spent many cold nights in his heated cabin,seeing that officers had greater perks. Murray applied to officer candidate school and was accepted pending his physical exam which he flunked due to his myopia. Being the ever astute man,this qualified him for immediate honorable discharge due to explicit instructions in the army law books, which I suspect my father was the only man in the U S Army to previously comprehend. He subsequently went to work with his Dad at 17 Liberty Street,adjacent to Wall Street; a spot which would eventually become the site of the World Trade Center. He did the eye refractions and both Herbert and Murray did the actual grinding,fitting and dispensing of the eyeglasses. I remember "Herbert's Optical Shop" vividly. To a little boy it was a place of wonder and mystery. It originally had a gigantic pair of golden spectacles with about fifty clear lightbulbs outlining the glasses. The State of New York later forced them to take down the sign as it was "unbefitting" a professional to so brazenly advertise their services(imagine what they would say about "Nip and Tuck" in the 1950's. Inside the narrow width maybe 25 ft by 125 ft long was in the front half the fitting stations with deeply stained solid oak fixtures including tables and file cabinets and well as displays of frames on the wall. In the back on the left was my Dad's refraction room which was state of the art for midcentury. To the right was the optical fabrication area with huge water cooled grinding wheels. Everything was done by hand. All the edging and smoothing out of the glass lenses. Both my father and his Dad were true artisans. Their work was exquisite is detail and perfection. To the way I see it, it was here that my father found his own space and boundaries. This is where he found his groove and found his self worth. He was fascinated with the details of his patients visual Rx and the details of each one's life. He would come home from a long day including an hour and a half commute in both directions and would meticulously go over each encounter. He felt he was the best at it around and I never doubted him on that. Every patient had a story, their adversities, their social position, their shortcomings. Most patients, according to his stories, were loyal repeat customers that deserved and received individual and focused attention. I think,in retrospect, that the 117 Liberty Street office was like a boutique medical practice. Like a Tiffany. My grandfather was very distinguished having once been awarded the best dressed man on Wall Street award. Unfortunately, as with many small practices the profits were much slimmer than the effort. My father chafed at the relatively meager income and my mother, well the resentment over the control his parents exerted over our lives was more than palpable, to say the least. Time and circumstances cause evolution. The world trade center,ie the twin towers destroyed in 2001, and all the infrastructure was built on what was Liberty Street. Ground breaking was in 1966, but the area needed to be emptied on leveled in anticipation. My father learned of his impending eviction via the rumor mill as is usual in great enterprises. That had to be by my recollect about 1960 or so. The era of the stranglehold over his spirit by his parents was coming to a close. One of the moments my father was most proud of was his successful negotiations with a powerful realtor/owner of his building to indemnify him for his loss of practice on Liberty Street. According to my dad,he was the sole small business to receive a dime from the big monied interests that were working in concert with the Port Authority of New York. This David vs Goliath was my fathers signature mentality. From my knowledge of how the world works, I tend to believe that his was a rather singular achievement: getting a check for ten or fifteen grand from those folks. He split from his father who retired and opened a optical shop in massapicqua,Long Island a working class neighborhood in mid island towards the south shore. He was uninterested in a high end practice,he wanted to not need to dote over every patrician, as before. My Mom joined him for a time as a office person,giving up her visiting nurse job. Not exactly a great idea for her. She had wanted him to relocate to a very busy mall. Believe it or not the "Mall" idea had just been invented and she with her powers of insight grasped it was the wave of the future. He just couldn't synthesize the steps necessary to put together an organization to run a business that had to by necessity be open more hours than a single person can do alone. It wasn't in his DNA. This Carmen's road office gave my Father enough of a financial boost that he could take a breath. He no longer had to commute on at first the Long Island Railroad and then the subway. Now he could cruise on the expressway against traffic in minutes. He bought new cars and felt he could sit back a bit. To backtrack a bit,he met and married my mother in the late 40's. As I said at my Mom's funeral, it was for him a love at first sight type of thing. He just had to have her. They lived at first in the east 80's in a brownstone. She wanted to stay there but Herbert's Optical Shop,just couldn't provide the means to maintain the lifestyle of the upper East side. They bought a house in the "Roslyn Country Club" on Long Island. A slightly upscale Levitt community. They had a whole 1/3. Of an acre. My brother was two and Mom was carrying me. So he commuted roughly ten plus years to lower Manhattan, quite a feat if you have ever tried it. So I guess he had just enough energy to do that. Not the most engaged dad in history,but I see now that he would have been there if he had the time and the knowledge base necessary, a not uncommon 1950's thing. Anyway, he wanted more space around himself. Just plain tired of neighbors and loud pool parties and we moved to a two acre "estate" in Muttontown. A bucolic north shore old monied neighborhood. Then they started traveling to Europe and elsewhere. He cut back on work. they loved to travel. He affinity for language skills was ascendant. They loved the architecture,museums and food of Europe. He closed his office when the neighborhood deteriorated and worked part time for others into his early eighties. They bought a second home in Tucson,where I had trained in anesthesiology. He would drive cross country as recently as five years ago. Both his and my mother's health slipped drastically over the past few years and the very big and out there guy became more and more subdued. He was with it at least partially until his death. He walked and spoke clearly on his final day. He simply went to sleep last Friday and went into eternity.