In the mid-1940s then teenager June Bacon-Bercey saw the image of a nuclear explosion on the cover of Time magazine and immediately had questions. How would the particles in the mushroom cloud move through the air? What effect would this have on our atmosphere? To find the answers, she set out to study atmospheric science, just as the field of meteorology was coming of age.
Her career would take her to places few Black women had gone before: the Atomic Energy Commission, where she worked as a senior researcher; a television news station in Buffalo, N.Y., where she became an on-air meteorologist; and even a TV game show. As a Black woman entering a STEM career at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Bacon-Bercey became a role model for women and people of color. And she marched through life to the tune of her favourite composer, John Philip Sousa. Her knowledge of his life and work helped her win $64,000 and led her to establish a scholarship for women studying meteorology.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Carol Sutton Lewis: It’s June of 1971 in Buffalo, New York, and June Bacon-Bercey has just arrived for her shift as a science reporter for the TV station WGR. Everything is in chaos. The station’s weather forecaster, a local celebrity named Frank Benny, won’t be coming into work today. The reason is almost too wild to be true. The night before he robbed a bank with a fake gun and was arrested.
June offers to do the weather segment herself. She’s not just a science reporter, she has a degree in meteorology and in a previous job, she was one of the scientists who made the forecasts that the National Weather Service provided to TV stations like WGR.
But she’s a woman, and this is at a time when clueless weather girls were put on air for their sex appeal, not their knowledge. As a science professional, June holds herself to a different standard and wants a chance to prove herself. June is also Black. Few faces like hers are on broadcast news in any capacity.
At first, the station manager ignores her offer, but with the clock ticking, she gets the “Okay, just this once.” June makes some phone calls, including one to her daughter Dail.
Dail St. Claire: She said, call your friends, tell them to watch the news, and if they like the news, to let the station know.
Carol Sutton Lewis: June starts her broadcast and predicts a heat wave will hit Buffalo the very next day.
Dail St. Claire: They had switchboards back then, it was all lit up.
Carol Sutton Lewis: I’m Carol Sutton Lewis, and this is Lost Women of Science. Today we bring you the story of June Bacon-Bercey. She’s known as a pioneer, the first Black female TV meteorologist. But she was much more than that. In today’s episode, we’ll go beyond the headlines to show how June was always focused on a much bigger picture, one that is more relevant today than ever: how to expand the field of atmospheric science to more women and especially more women of color.
For a lot of June’s life, her focus and dedication to her profession marched along to the music of John Philip Souza, the American March King. It was like her personal soundtrack, and we’ll see how important his music was to June over and over again.
But let’s go back to the beginning. In some ways you could say it all started with a bang–a very big bang. Born June Esther Griffin in Wichita, Kansas in October, 1928, June was in high school when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the second World War.
Dail St. Claire: She saw the mushroom cloud on the cover of Time Magazine as a young girl.That’s what sparked her, frankly her mission in life.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Dail St. Claire is one of June’s two daughters. Time Magazine actually ran a number of cover images related to the iconic atomic cloud. The first one featured a portrait of President Harry Truman as man of the year for his decision to bomb Japan. Next to his portrait was a stylized image of a nuclear explosion. Emerging from the dark cloud was a hand holding a bolt of lightning like the Greek God Zeus. That was in 1945 when June was 17.
Dail St. Claire: The way my mother thought is just beautiful. To think, you see the mushroom cloud and her first concern was the atomic particles, the heavy atomic particles floating to the earth and the lighter atomic particles floating to the air, and that’s what sparked her drive to pursue meteorology so she could help determine what that was doing to the world.
Carol Sutton Lewis: June had already shown interest in science at high school, so perhaps it’s not that surprising that she was curious to learn more about the effects of nuclear fallout. It was a word that was all over the press at the time. People wanted to know what exactly happened when a nuclear bomb exploded.
June was so interested in science and particularly the elements that one of her teachers even encouraged her to consider studying meteorology. It seemed like a good fit despite some obvious obstacles. Few women went into hard sciences at that time, and even fewer black women, but that didn’t deter June–probably because of her family.
She was raised by her uncle and two aunts who were exceptional women themselves. Bessie Hallbrook was an entrepreneur who founded and ran the first Black beauty school in Wichita, the Powder Box Academy. Hortense Wong, or Aunt Tense, was also a savvy business woman. She was a dancer and manager of a renowned variety tent show that toured all over the South in the early-to-mid 20th century. Part review, part comedy and part musical showcase, the show even featured legendary blues singers, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Aunt Tense was married to show owner Charles Collier and after he died, she ran the show herself.
Dail St. Claire: These were women behind their husbands, and then took over when their husbands were no longer able to operate. So that’s the environment in which she was in.
Carol Sutton Lewis: June’s father, an attorney, died when she was young, and her mother, a music teacher, remarried and moved to Florida, so her aunts became her surrogate parents.
Dail St. Claire: And I think that environment is what instilled in her, the fundamentals of what I was always told. “No” is not in our family’s vocabulary, the word “no,” whether you’re launching a beauty school, whether– [laughs], it’s always about the how. I mean, stopping was not, was never an option.
Carol Sutton Lewis: According to Dail, Aunt Tense and Aunt Bessie taught June to be meticulous–how to find out the requirements of the things she wanted, and then ensure she qualified or even overqualified for it. She had her sight set squarely on understanding the atmospheric dynamics of the mushroom cloud and all of its poisonous particles. One advisor pushed her to take home economics. But in later interviews, June always said, why would she do that when she got a bad grade in home ec and an A in thermodynamics?
First, she studied mathematics at a local university in Wichita, but what she wanted was a degree in atmospheric science, which wasn’t a common program at the time. One place with a top program was the University of California in Los Angeles, where her Aunt Tense had recently moved. And so, June enrolled in UCLA.
In what would become true June Bacon-Bercey fashion, while she was studying, she was already working in her future field as a part-time forecaster for the US Weather Bureau, later known as the National Weather Service. In 1954, she became the first black woman to graduate with a degree in meteorology.
June was entering the field of meteorology at a pivotal time. The study of the weather goes back millennia, from asking Oracles to observing birds in flight and other genuinely useful animal signals, to making forecasts based on cloud shapes. But over the centuries, atmospheric science began to include more empirical data as scientists developed metrics for temperature and pressure. Then, in the 19th century, we started launching weather balloons. These were equipped first with human data collectors, recording temperature, pressure, and other details. Then later with meteorological instruments that fell back to earth after the balloons burst, and then had to be found and read. Beginning in the 1930s, devices called radiosondes allowed the same data to be transmitted instantly in real time. And meanwhile, weather balloons were made ever heartier and higher flying.
Kristine Harper: You send the balloon up and then you track it with a device that allows you to determine its height and its direction.
Carol Sutton Lewis: That’s Dr. Kristine Harper. She’s a meteorologist, former navy forecaster and science historian.
Kristine Harper: And from that, a forecaster can figure out what the upper level winds are. And if by comparing the upper level winds with the winds you have at the surface, then you can figure out in which direction any kind of weather system is moving. Because if it’s one direction at the surface, but it’s a different direction aloft that gives you other information about where you may have a change in the weather coming from.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Dr. Harper says that the middle of the century was a key time for academic meteorology. UCLA, where June earned her degree, was actually one of the first universities in the US to have a modern atmospheric sciences department. Along with four others, the UCLA department was founded in 1940 as the government rushed to train hundreds of new meteorologists. It all came down to the pressing military needs of World War II.
Kristine Harper: They were going to build something like 45,000 aircraft in a very short period of time. And if you have that many aircraft going up into the skies, you need a weather forecast for those people, or they’re not going to make it back down again.
Carol Sutton Lewis: On top of that, the era of computerized modeling was only just beginning. In 1950, the ENIAC computer, one of the first electronic computers, had just been used for a weather prediction experiment. That was the world June entered after college. She got her first full-time job in Washington DC at the US Weather Bureau. June’s role was to parse the temperature, humidity, and wind data. She was becoming an expert in how the layers of the air between us and space behave differently depending on their conditions. All of it, a complicated version of fluid dynamics in which air behaves like a faster kind of liquid.
Kristine Harper: In the 1950s, meteorology was becoming a respectable science. So at the early part of the 20th century it was really looked down upon by the physicists, for instance, all right, because you can’t do experiments, it’s just out there in the open. It’s really fuzzy kind of stuff. If you’re a physicist, it’s really fuzzy. But by the 1950s because of World War II, we had many more observation stations all over the world. So we had lots of data, and with computers we could now handle that data. Now, the computers we were using in the 1950s were less powerful than our current cell phones, but they were way more powerful than anything we’d ever had before.
Carol Sutton Lewis: It was hard work even with the help of computers. Human experts like June had to move huge sheets of paper and plot lots of data points by hand in tiny spaces. But it had a certain rhythm, and June Bacon-Bercey was all about keeping to the beat and marching forward. You see every day on her drive to work, June took the John Phillips Sousa Bridge to cross the Anacostia River from DC to the National Weather Analysis Center in Suitland Maryland. And while she drove, still very much the daughter of a music teacher and an accomplished pianist herself, June listened to the music by Susa, one of America’s most prolific and patriotic composers. It became the soundtrack to her calling as a scientist.
Dail St. Claire: My mother was a proud American, and she respected Sousa’s commitment to America, and she felt the same. She felt a calling to meteorology, and a calling as an American to solve some of the most complex problems that we’re facing in the world at the time.
Carol Sutton Lewis: This commute was part of how June readied herself for her day as a government forecaster. A day she would spend as one of the only women and one of the only black people in her workplace.
Dail St. Claire: she was very much aware of her circumstances and very much aware of her presence. Buttoned down shirt, pencil, skirt, pumps: she was very clear on dress code. From her perspective, you command respect with your mind and you command the stuck the way you work. And, she was always flawless, which we know takes a lot of work.
Carol Sutton Lewis: But June never lost her interest in that mushroom cloud. By now, in the late 1950s, we were in the middle of the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the United States were vying to create the most powerful nuclear weapons. The US government was testing bombs over the Nevada desert, and even more potent bombs in and near islands in the Pacific Ocean, where residents have been forced to leave. But opposition to these tests was mounting, and not just from the downwinders living near test sites in Nevada. It also came from scientists who initially feared the radiation would cause genetic mutations and birth defects. Throughout the 1950s as the Cold War intensified, Americans received public service announcements about the dangers of nuclear attacks and fallout.
Fallout PSA: You need to know about fallout, what it is, how to detect it, and what to do to protect yourself against it.
Carol Sutton Lewis: The chemist and activist, Linus Pauling, became a leading voice of that concern. He circulated a petition calling for an international ban on nuclear testing. By the time he presented it to the United Nations in 1958, that petition had the signatures of more than 9,000 scientists. Here’s Linus Pauling in 1958.
Linus Pauling: Fallout, radioactive fallout, causes damage to the pool of human germ plasm, in that will result–that does result–in the birth of an additional number of defective children. Also, there are serious effects on the health of human beings now living according to the information that is now available. This is the opinion that I, and many of my scientific colleagues, a great many have.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Then in 1959, amid all this controversy, June got a job offer that was hard to refuse as Senior advisor at the Atomic Energy Commission. It gave June a front row seat to one of the hottest debates of the era, the safety of nuclear testing. Her daughter Dail St. Claire says her mom was proud of her achievement, but didn’t take much time being proud. Instead, in the spirit of Sousa’s music, June always thought about marching on to what was next for her work
Dail St. Claire: My mother always looked forward. My mother was very clear on her mission, and, honestly, that was the first step in her mind.
Carol Sutton Lewis: In this atmosphere of hope and urgency, June got new security clearances. Unlike the rest of the country, she would know just how many bombs the government was testing, and she joined researchers who were studying everything from how radiation exposure impacted our genetic makeup to whether the equipment used to detect earthquakes could also determine if another country was testing nuclear weapons underground.
June worked and often disagreed with Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s former colleague on the Manhattan Project, and sometimes known as the father of the hydrogen bomb. Teller, was a strong proponent of above ground nuclear testing to keep up with the Soviet Union, a goal that for him outweighed any potential risks to human health. The Hungarian Teller, whose family fled the Nazis, even debated Linus Pauling on this subject in 1958.
Edward Teller: Now, let me tell you, quiet, clear. This damage, this alleged damage which the small radioactivity is causing by producing cancer and leukemia has not been proved to the best of my knowledge by any kind of decent and clear statistics. Peace cannot be obtained by wishing for it. We live in the same world as the Russians, who have said–whose leader has said–that he wants to bury us, and they mean it. Disarmament, cessation of tests will not automatically bring us closer to peace.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Dail remembers that when June worked at the commission, she often felt out of step with Teller and others making high level decisions about the agency’s work. While they debated national security, she was concerned about the short and long-term risks of fallout.
Dail St. Claire: I know that she was trying to help farmers, and some of her work was also with people in the grain and soy commodities, and I didn’t really know why. But now I see more and understand more because she would speak about the particles impacting the atmosphere, which would shift weather patterns for decades or longer, and particles that would fall back down after some period of time and impact our land.
Carol Sutton Lewis: In the late fifties, scientists at the Atomic Energy Commission were finding new information about a radioactive isotope called Strontium 90. It’s a product of nuclear fission that was previously believed to stay airborne for a decade. It’s also sometimes referred to as a bone seeker. It settles in bones and bone marrow leading to higher rates of bone, tissue, and blood cancers. But now it was being found at high levels in wheat in Minnesota, a thousand miles from the Nevada testing sites. Bread sold in New York City tested for four times the permissible limit and powdered milk in the region was showing increasing levels as well. Later, other researchers found sharp rises in the amount of Strontium 90 and the baby teeth of children in St. Louis. June never brought her work home to her daughters, so they only caught glimpses of what she was working on and how she felt about her job.
Dail St. Claire: She did not say she was disillusioned, but hearing her conversations with her friends, I’m summarizing that as a word, and disillusion and– and disappointment of not so much the work, but the actions that were being done at the time. I’ve seen in her letters, her speaking about taking a stand and one of her quotes, “look back and be confronted by the truth of what we are seeing,” nobody did.
Carol Sutton Lewis: So despite the fact that June had finally achieved the role she had set her sights on, she would stay only three years there. She left the Atomic Energy Commission in 1962, just a year before the US signed the Landmark Limited Test Ban Treaty. Afterwards, June decided to go back to her first love: weather forecasting. But along the way, she’d find a new line of work and fulfill a dream with a little help from her musical hero, John Philip Souza.
More after the break.
Carol Sutton Lewis: When June Bacon-Bercey returned to weather forecasting, she rejoined the Weather Bureau at its New York City office. But June was beginning to think about other things: how she could parlay her expertise and atmospheric sciences into something that directly touched the public. She’d seen how the debate about nuclear fallout had been confusing to a public that didn’t understand the science. Here’s her daughter, Dail.
Dail St. Claire: She embraced the profession of meteorology and education was her tool to educate the public about the weather, and about the environment, and ultimately about other paths of having a career that, frankly, appeared to be closed to women and people of color.
Carol Sutton Lewis: How best could she use her science background to educate people? June decided to become a journalist, and if she were on TV, she could also show to a whole generation of Black children that a person like them could do that job. So, June started to take journalism classes at New York University, and in 1969 landed her first science reporter job at a TV station in Washington DC. Dail remembers how her mother, then divorced and a single parent of two daughters, would commute to and from DC on the train, relying on her aunts, friends, and nannies for help. In 1971, she applied for and got a job as a science reporter at WGR in Buffalo, New York. Dail remembers that June enjoyed this new career path, but her real goal as a journalist was actually a continuation of her meteorological profession and scientific expertise.
Dail St. Claire: She wanted very much to be a chief meteorologist on her merit as a meteorologist, and she always spouted the names of the other chief meteorologists. During the sixties and seventies, she, in many ways, watched them and practiced for the day when she would be a chief meteorologist herself.
Carol Sutton Lewis: And when that day came, she was ready.
Dail St. Claire: These were not coincidences, you know, preparation meets, meets opportunity, and that was her opportunity.
Carol Sutton Lewis: June had been practicing presenting the weather with her cameraman colleague at WGR, Roland Barnes, who is also Black. They worked after hours several nights a week, even though she was not sure she would ever be given the chance. But when the regular weather man, Frank Benny, robbed a bank and didn’t show up for work, June stepped in. And not only was she ready to go on camera, she had an important story to tell her viewers. She had studied the data and she knew a heat wave was coming to Buffalo that week. Here’s historian Christine Harper again on how June likely used specialized charts and data from the government to make this forecast.
Kristine Harper: Usually the atmosphere above you is significantly cooler than where you are. But if that showed a warming pattern, a loft, and it was moving in over the area, and if high pressure had also settled in over the area, which meant nothing was going to move, right? So that once that air settled in there, it was going to park over the top of Buffalo and it would not be shoved away. She would’ve been able to tell viewers in the area, “be prepared, it’s gonna be warm and it’s gonna stay warm.”
Carol Sutton Lewis: Harper also thinks June’s ability to read the actual charts would’ve been vital for her to give a forecast that was much more specific to Buffalo.
Kristine Harper: Essentially, people who were really good at this were able to carry a three dimensional picture of the atmosphere in their heads.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Not only had June successfully rallied her daughter and friends to call the station en masse and keep her on the air, but she was right about the heat wave. Very quickly, June Bacon-Bercey was given a permanent job on WGR’s weather team. Here’s June herself in a broadcast.
June Bacon-Bercey: Well, it’s just a week before spring hits by the calendar, but Old Man Winter is reluctant to leave.
Carol Sutton Lewis: June initially had reservations about appearing on TV.
June Bacon-Bercey: I didn’t want to, because at that time, weathercasters–female weathercasters–were doing weather in a way that they would grab the public’s attention by playing ukuleles and doing all the little silly and absurd things. I didn’t wanna do it, but they prevailed upon me and I agreed, and I loved it afterwards and became a television weathercaster.
Carol Sutton Lewis: June stuck to her science and became an instant local celebrity. A year later, she was WGR-TV’s Chief Meteorologist, and in 1972 she won the coveted seal of approval for excellence in TV weather forecasting from the American Meteorological Society or AMS. She was the first woman and the first Black person to ever receive the award. And although June herself never complained publicly about racial discrimination or misogyny, others are sure she faced both. Like Janice Huff, she’s the chief meteorologist at NBC4 in New York City.
Janice Huff: You know, I won’t say the word, but what is that woman doing there? Get her off the air. Oh yeah. I was faced with that. But did they take me off the air? No. Did I leave and go somewhere else? No.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Janice is Black and has been in the field since the 1980s.
Janice Huff: And, you know, you think about a person like June who came before and long before I did having to deal with those same issues.Then you kind of go, “oh, well, she probably had to deal with that, too.” It’s okay, you know, if she can do it, I can certainly do it. You don’t allow the walls to stop you, you just climb over the wall if there is one, or you go around the wall, or you tear down if there is one.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Janice also has received an AMS Seal of Approval For excellence in TV Weather Forecasting, just like June.
Even with her success, June would change jobs yet again, looking for new ways to serve her profession and the public understanding of meteorology. She went back to forecasting, working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA. She stayed focused on education, conducting weather briefings for researchers, government officials, and journalists as Chief of Weather and Television Services. She even worked in the aviation branch of the National Weather Service, where she helped air traffic controllers and commercial air pilots understand atmospheric science in the name of safer flying.
Peggy LeMone: June generated a lot of the ideas
Carol Sutton Lewis: This is Dr. Peggy LeMone, an atmospheric scientist. She and June served together on the American Meteorological Society Board on Women. June, who was friendly with civil rights leaders like Shirley Chisholm, Adam Clayton Powell, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., also served on the society’s board on minorities. The effort to include not just women, but Black women and men in meteorology, was increasingly vital to her work.
Peggy recalls one meeting of the AMS in the early 1970s.
Peggy LeMone: One of the things they were worried about was that there weren’t enough young people joining. Well, there might be a problem with young people, but how many women and minorities are members of the American Meteorological Society?
Carol Sutton Lewis: One of her favorite stories about June shows just how inventive she could be when it came to making a point. In 1975 in a crowded room at the AMS’ annual meeting in Denver, June is on stage with a senior male scientist named Charles Hosler. He’s interviewing her for a job.
Peggy LeMone: And Hosler asked her the typical male to female questions like, do you really want to do this? You know, what’s your husband going to think? What are you going to do if you have children? And so on and so on and so on.
Carol Sutton Lewis: The kinds of questions that successful women in scientific research face all the time. But this isn’t a job interview. It’s a scripted skit with a purpose.
Peggy LeMone: How can you raise a family on a university salary if you become a professor? And she, you know, just answered them.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Then abruptly:
Peggy LeMone: They reversed roles and she asked him the same questions. So, how’s your family going to live under your salary? What are you going to do if you have children? And so on. And during the time that June was being asked questions, there might’ve been some embarrassed laughter, but not a whole lot. But when the roles were reversed, everybody was laughing. And the room was packed, it was a standing room only, and it was a big room. So it was really, really impressive and fun.
Carol Sutton Lewis: June knew what she was doing.
Peggy LeMone: She impressed everybody. She was always very friendly, very positive and full of ideas, but not only full of ideas, but wanting to follow through. I mean, you know, we probably both met people who say, well, I got this great idea. Why don’t you take care of it? That wasn’t June. She says, I got this idea and I’d be glad to follow through on it.
Carol Sutton Lewis: But the way she ended up reaching a much wider audience actually had nothing to do with meteorology at all.
In 1977, June Bacon-Bercey became a contestant on the revival of the $64,000 question. A popular game show from the mid 1950s that came back as the $128,000 Question.
Dail St. Claire: My mom shared with everyone that this $128,000 game show was the path to launch the scholarship that she’d been speaking about for years. From her perspective, education was the path for women and people of color to achieve what they chose to achieve without obstacles.
Carol Sutton Lewis: In this game show, contestants got to pick their own area of expertise. So what topic did June pick? Not the weather, not nuclear fallout, but… John Philip Souza, her favorite composer whose music she’d been listening to for decades. Studying late at night after work, she immersed herself in the composer’s life. Her daughter Dail recalls flying home to Washington, DC from college in California every other weekend for several months to help her mother study for the show.
Dail St. Claire: My mom’s mission became all of her friend’s mission and my mission.
Carol Sutton Lewis: The format of the game show was simple. Every time you answered a question correctly, you doubled your winnings. There were three other contestants on the show with June. The host of the show, Mike Darrow, started with an easy one. What instrument did the sousaphone replace? June replied, “any idiot knows it’s the tuba.” By the time Darrow got to the $64,000 question, June was the only contestant left. It was a seven part question and the final part: Sousa’s successor as head of the Marine band was once arrested for refusing to play a Sousa march. Name him.
Dail St. Claire: I didn’t know she would even know that answer. But I remember her thinking and slowly speaking to the answer and how exciting it was.
Carol Sutton Lewis: June said, “Francesco Fanciulli.”
Dail St. Claire: And then the lights and the, you know, congratulations and the audience, and then they panned the audience and everyone’s looking, wide-eyed. And, and my mom was, you know, smiling, but it wasn’t that she was ecstatic.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Instead of basking in the glory, June stayed focused on her ultimate goal of making STEM education like hers more accessible.
Dail St. Claire: Mom was accepting, congratulations, and went on to say how happy she was to be able to launch the June Bacon-Bercey scholarship for women.
Carol Sutton Lewis: June later told the Washington Post, “They mailed the check three days later. I looked at it for two days. It really did have three zeros.” Winnings in hand. June launched her scholarship program working with a scientific professional group called the American Geophysical Union to establish the June Bacon-Bercey Scholarship in Atmospheric Science for Women. She was 59 years old and already had a legacy, and that legacy would only grow. She helped establish a meteorology lab at the historically Black Jackson State University in Mississippi. Later in life, she worked directly in the classroom as a substitute science teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. Even her daughter, Dail, counts herself as a legacy of her mother’s scientific profession. Her own successful STEM career has included both engineering and financial management.
Dail St. Claire: I embrace the scientific method because teaching me, and in my case how to think, that’s foundational in my entire life.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Dail says her mother never really retired and never really wanted to. Not until at age 89: she was diagnosed with frontotemporal lobe dementia. She moved into Supportive Care and died the following year in July, 2019.
It seems fitting to remember June this year in particular. The new US administration has declared efforts to increase the representation of women, people of color, and other marginalized groups to be wasteful, suspect, even racist. And the federal agency where June worked. Noah has already laid off hundreds of employees who do things like track hurricanes and make weather models more accurate. Meteorologist Peggy LeMone thinks June would’ve reacted strongly to these changes in government priorities, which run counter to her life’s work.
Peggy LeMone: I think she would be talking to the people around her and saying: we’ll get through this, we’ll get through this, somehow we’ll get through this, I’m on your side, I’ve got your back, I’ll do everything I can for you no matter what happens.
Carol Sutton Lewis: And finally what of June herself? How did she see herself and her life’s work? Reading one of June’s letters, Dail tells us.
Dail St. Claire: She said, “I am standing on the shoulders of people who gave so much more.” And that just brings tears to my eyes because I know what she was trying to do and the objections that she faced.
Carol Sutton Lewis: When June said she was standing on the shoulders of others, she undoubtedly was thinking about her friends in the Civil Rights movement, but in the world of atmospheric science, she was the one who stood tall and showed others the way.
Dail St. Claire: She said, “In spite of everything, I’m still here.”
Carol Sutton Lewis: This episode was hosted by me, Carol Sutton Lewis. Christie Taylor was our producer, and Laura Isensee was our senior producer. Ollie Guillou did the sound design and mixing. Lizzie Younan composes all of our music. We had fact checking help from Lexi Atiya. Special thanks to intern Sophia Levin and Shelley Wei for their research on this episode, as well as Oregon State University for its archives of Linus Pauling. Thanks also to the executive producers, Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner, as well as our senior managing producer, Deborah Unger and program manager Eowyn Burtner. Our art was created by Lily Whear. Thanks go to Jeff DelViscio and our publishing partner, Scientific American. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We’re distributed by PRX. You can find our show notes in a transcript of this episode at our website Lostwomenofscience.org. And while you’re there. Please don’t forget to hit the all important donate button. See you next time.
Host
Carol Sutton Lewis
Carol is a co-host of Lost Women of Science and co-presented our third season about Yvonne Y. Clark, The First Lady of Engineering. She also hosts and produces the award-winning podcast Ground Control Parenting with Carol Sutton Lewis.
Producer
Christie Taylor
Christie is an audio producer and science journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. She has worked for Science Friday, New Scientistmagazine, and Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.
Senior Producer
Laura Isensee
Guests
Dail St. Claire
Dail St. Claire is the daughter of June Bacon-Bercey. She is also CEO of the Episcopal Church Foundation and Endowment, and an independent board director of Verde Clean Fuels, a public alternative fuel company.
Margaret “Peggy” LeMone
Margaret “Peggy” LeMone is Senior Scientist Emeritus, National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Kristine Harper
Kristine Harper is a professor in the Department of Science Education at the University of Copenhagen, and the author of Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology.
Janice Huff
Janice Huff is the Chief Meteorologist at NBC 4, New York City, a member of the New York State Broadcasters Association’s Hall of Fame, and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
Further Reading:
Weather on the Air: A History of Broadcast Meteorology. Robert Henson. American Meteorological Society, 2010
Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology. Kristine Harper. MIT Press, 2008
June Bacon-Bercey, 90, Pathbreaking Meteorologist, Is Dead, by Daniel E. Slotnik, the New York Times, January 7, 2020.
