Oscar Wilfred Arsenault

Arsenault, Oscar Wilfred, 85, of St. Petersburg, died Friday June 1, 2007 at Bayfront Medical Center. The cause of death was prostate cancer. He was born in Rumford, Maine, on December 13, 1921, the first of seven children born to Alfred Arsenault, a professional diver, and Laura Cormier Arsenault, a schoolteacher. He spent his early childhood in New Bedford, MA, where his father worked for Taylor Salvage, but his family relocated to Cocagne, New Brunswick, following his father?s death by drowning in 1931. At the age of 14, he moved to Harwich, MA, on Cape Cod, where he worked as a boat builder and photographer?s apprentice before entering the US Navy in February 1941. Assigned to the battleship USS New York, he took one of World War II?s iconic photographs in March 1943?a bridge-level shot of 14-inch gun turrets awash in heavy seas in the North Atlantic. Fluent in French, he acted as a translator when the New York confronted a pro-Vichy French fleet off the coast of Morocco during the Battle of Casablanca. From 1943 to 1945, he served in a Pacific-based reconnaissance squadron, taking high-altitude photographs from a B-24 bomber. At war?s end, he was stationed in Okinawa, where he supervised the photo lab that processed the first pictures of the nuclear destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After fours years in the reserves, he returned to active duty in 1950 and later served tours of duty on the carriers USS Hornet 1954-55 and USS Independence 1959-61. He remained in the Navy until his retirement as a Lieutenant Commander in 1971. In 1957, while working as an instructor at the Navy?s motion picture school in Pensacola, FL, he moonlighted as a television cameraman, becoming the first cameraman in the Southeast to use the new technology of videotape. While assigned to the Naval Photographic Center in Washington, DC, from 1961 to 1963, he designed the cameras used in low-altitude reconnaissance flights over Cuba during the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, and in April 1963 he coordinated the bathysphere cameras during the effort to recover the crew of the USS Thresher, a nuclear submarine lost off the coast of Cape Cod. During the 1970s, he managed the MCS Microfilm company in Jacksonville, FL. He later attended Florida Junior College and the University of North Florida, before working as a wedding photographer from 1981 to 1998. In 2006, he and his wife of 62 years, Patricia Ostby Arsenault, moved to the Westminster Suncoast retirement community in St. Petersburg. He was an avid golfer, woodworker, sailor, and photographer, serving as Westminster Suncoast?s unofficial photographer until a week before his death. Survivors include his wife Patricia, St. Petersburg; a son, Dr. Raymond Arsenault, St. Petersburg; a daughter, Pamela Ward, Brandon, FL; two granddaughters, Amelia Arsenault, Santa Monica, CA, and Anne Arsenault, Tallahassee, FL; two sisters, Bertha Rowland, Fernandina Beach, FL, and Doris Gordon, San Diego, CA; and two brothers, Roger Arsenault, Fernandina Beach, FL, and Gerald Arsenault, Sontana, CA. Anderson-McQueen Funeral & Cremation Centers ? N.E. St. Petersburg.