posted 07-22-2025 10:14 PM               

Owen had created and maintained his Beck website for over 20 years. The website had a large number of naval and space collectors constantly referencing covers on the site and eagerly awaiting updates that he would periodically post of new discoveries sent to him for cataloging. Owen and his website were my go-to sites for any Beck space recovery ship questions I had.

He is survived by his wife, Susan; siblings Marian (John) Poteet, Jolene Murray Morris, and Lane (Leslie) Murray; his seven children; numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and many extended family members, friends and all of us collectors who regularly corresponded with him.

Rest in peace Owen.

You can see his obituary here.

posted 07-23-2025 07:54 AM               

His website was a treasure, one of just five I go to on a regular basis. I did notice that it was no longer loading a few weeks back, but I was hoping that, as in the past, it was just a temporary issue with the service provider.

I know very little about the intellectual property rights, copyright, and ownership of a deceased person's website, but it seems a tragedy and a complete waste for it to just disappear.

The Wayback link shown above is hopefully future-proof. Like the Egyptian pharaohs I wish Morris Beck and Owen Murray long and prosperous afterlives through the works they have left behind on Earth

posted 07-23-2025 10:20 AM               

Not enough can be said about how wonderful Owen was to me and the community. His knowledge, passion, and dedication to sharing history was tremendous and he was a mentor to me in my research and collecting over many years.

In 2023 I made a mirror of his complete website locally on my computer because I feared at some point it may be lost and it was too valuable of a resource to go away. As mentioned above, the WayBack Machine has a good backup of the site from several dates. I manually submitted the site to be archived on the WayBack Machine several times over the years to supplement their automatic process. As good as it is, the WayBack Machine is not perfect, you may find this mirror helpful for links that are broken or images that are missing from their backups.

For those interested, I've loaded my complete mirror here from October 2023.