Moment in Time (December 2, 2021)
These "miners" are sitting in front of a coal loader made by the Jeffrey Manufacturing Company of Columbus. Corporate photographer and Grandview resident Fred Behmer often staged environments that would be similar to where Jeffrey Manufacturing equipment would be used for purposes of documentation and advertising. This 1918 photograph of a mine scene used a background painted to look like the interior of a coal mine. It was created inside the Jeffrey plant, with Jeffrey employees dressed like miners having a lunch break.
Fred Behmer was born in 1886 in Columbus. At an early age he gained access to a camera and quickly developed an eye for photography. At 16 years old he started taking photographs for money, and at 17 years old he started working at Jeffrey Manufacturing doing corporate photography. He married in 1907, and he and his wife Sophia had a son Fred and two daughters. The family later moved to a new home at 1407 Wyandotte Road in Grandview.
After about a year, Fred left Jeffrey to join Baker Art Gallery of Columbus, at the time the largest photo studio in the country. After two years he went to work for the Ohio Sun, a Columbus newspaper, where he was the sole photojournalist. In that capacity he was the first local news photographer to cover out-of-town Ohio State University football games, and owned the first Graflex camera used for press work in Columbus. The Graflex was popular for sports and press photography due largely to its use of a focal plane shutter to produce shutter speeds fast enough to appear to freeze rapid motion such as was common in football games.
He returned to Jeffrey in 1908 as Chief Photographer. Jeffrey’s primary business at the time was related to the coal mining industry, having been formed from the Lechner Mining Machine Company. Lechner founders were inventors and manufacturers of some of the first automated coal mining equipment. Jeffrey went on to become a diversified manufacturing business, producing equipment that included stone crushers, loaders, conveyors, and locomotives that were used in stone quarries near Marble Cliff and across the country.
Behmer did all of the photography and layout for the company catalogs and instruction manuals and for advertising spreads. In 1910 He made the first big photo advertising blowups in Columbus. Jeffrey built simulated industrial environments in their Columbus facility in order to place their products for the photography sessions. This photo shows a number of Jeffrey employees acting as coal miners for a Behmer photo shoot. He sometimes sat in as one of the “miners”. Fred also photographed company events, including their annual golf outing at the Arlington Country Club in Marble Cliff.
Fred’s son Fred Jr. graduated from Grandview Heights High School in 1926 and started working with his dad at Jeffrey while he attended OSU. In 1933 he joined Jeffrey full time, assuming the “roadwork” responsibilities that his dad had previously done. He did Jeffrey industrial photography, including movies of Jeffrey machinery at work, in the 48 states, Canada and Mexico. He succeeded his father as head of Jeffrey Photography Department in 1953. He died in 1968 at 59 years old. Fred Sr. died in 1972.