The Weather Expert Who Answered the $64,000 Question
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It's June of 1971 in Buffalo, New York, and June Bacon-Bercy 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, Dale. She said, "Call your friends, tell them to watch the news, and if they like the news, to let the station know."

June starts her broadcast and predicts a heat wave will hit Buffalo the very next day. They had switchboards back then. It was all lit up.

I'm Carol Sutton Lewis, and this is Lost Women of Science. Today, we bring you the story of June Bacon Bursey. 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 Sousa, 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. 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. Dale St. Clair 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. 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 mineralogy so she could help determine what that was doing to the world.

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 Powderbox Academy.

Hortense Wong, or Antensie, was also a savvy businesswoman. 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. Antensie was married to show owner Charles Collier, and after he died, she ran the show herself.

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. 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. I think that environment is what instilled in her the fundamentals of what I was always told, no, it's not in our family's vocabulary.

The word now, whether you're launching a beauty school, it's always about the how. I mean, stopping was not was never an option.

According to Dale, Aunt Tensie and Aunt Bessie taught June to be meticulous, how to find out the requirements of the thing she wanted and then ensure she qualified or even overqualified for it. She had her sights 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 Tensie had recently moved. And so, June enrolled in UCLA.

In what would become true June Bacon-Bercy fashion, while she was studying, she was already working in her future field as a part-time forecaster for the U.S. 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 this same data to be transmitted instantly in real time. And meanwhile, weather balloons were made ever hardier and higher flying. You send the balloon up and then you track it with a device that allows you to determine

its height and its direction. That's Dr. Christine Harper. She's a meteorologist, former Navy forecaster, and science historian. And from that, a forecaster can figure out what the upper-level winds are. And 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. 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 U.S. 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. 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. 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, D.C., at the U.S. 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. 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.

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-Bercy was all about keeping to the beat and marching forward. You see, every day on her drive to work, June took the John Philip Sousa Bridge to cross the Anacostia River from D.C. to the National Weather Analysis Center in Sweetland, 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 Sousa, one of America's most prolific and patriotic composers.

It became the soundtrack to her calling as a scientist. My mother was a proud American and she respected SUSE'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 were facing the world at the time.

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. She was very much aware of her circumstances and very much aware of her presence. Button-down shirt, pencil skirt, pumps. She was very clear on dress code.

From her perspective, you command respect with your mind and you command respect the way you work. And she was always flawless, which we know takes a lot of work. 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 U.S. 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. You need to know about fallout, what it is, how to detect it, and what to do to protect yourself against it. 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. Radioactive fallout causes damage to the pool of human germplasm that does result in the birth of an additional number of defectors.

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.

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, Dale St. Clair, 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. My mother always looked forward to it.

My mother was very clear on her mission, and honestly that was the first step in her mind. 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.

Now let me tell you, quite clearly,

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 with 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. Dale 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.

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 and longer, and particles that would fall back down after some period of time and impact our land. In the late 50s, 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 in the baby teeth of children in St. Louis. June never brought her work home to her daughters, so they only got glimpses of what she was working on and how she felt about her job.

She did not say she was disillusioned by hearing her conversations with her friends. I'm summarizing that as a word, and disillusion 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.

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 U.S. 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 Sousa. More after the break.

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When June Bacon-Bercy 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 in 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, Dale. 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.

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, D.C.,

Dale remembers how her mother, then divorced and a single parent of two daughters, would commute to and from D.C. 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.

Dale 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. 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 60s and 70s. She was...

in many ways, watched them and practiced for the day when she would be a chief mineralogist herself. And when that day came, she was ready. These were not coincidences. Preparation meets opportunity. And that was her opportunity. 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 weatherman, 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. Usually the atmosphere above you is significantly cooler than where you are. But if that showed a warming pattern aloft 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 have been able to tell viewers in the area, be prepared. It's going to be warm and it's going to stay warm.

Harper also thinks June's ability to read the actual charts would have been vital for her to give a forecast that was much more specific to Buffalo. Essentially, people who were really good at this were able to carry a three-dimensional picture of the atmosphere in their heads. 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-Bercy was given a permanent job on WGR's weather team. Here's June herself in a broadcast. Well, it's just a week before spring hits by the calendar, but old man winter is reluctant to leave. June initially had reservations about appearing on TV.

I didn't want to because at that time female weathercasters were doing weather in a way that they would grab the public's attention by playing ukuleles and doing all little silly and absurd things. I didn't want to do it, but they prevailed upon me and I agreed and I loved it afterwards and became a television weathercaster.

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. 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.

Janice is Black and has been in the field since the 1980s. And, you know, you think about a person like June, who came before and belonged 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 just climb over the wall if there is one, or you go around the wall or you tear down if there is one.

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. June generated a lot of the ideas. This is Dr. Peggy Limon, 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 of 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. 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? 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's annual meeting in Denver, June is on stage with a senior male scientist named Charles Hosler. He's interviewing her for a job. 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. 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. How can you raise a family on a university salary if you become a professor? And she, you know, just answered them. Then abruptly... 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 have 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 standing room only, and it was a big room. So it was really, really impressive and fun. ♪

June knew what she was doing. 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. But the way she ended up reaching a much wider audience actually had nothing to do with meteorology at all.

In 1977, June Bacon-Bercy 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. 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 success

what they chose to achieve without obstacles. 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 Sousa, 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 Dale recalls flying home to Washington, D.C. from college in California every other weekend for several months to help her mother study for the show. My mom's mission became all of her friends' mission and my mission. 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. 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. June said, Francesco Fanciulli. And then the lights and the congratulations and the audience and they panned the audience and everyone's looking wide-eyed. And my mom was, you know, smiling, but it wasn't that she was ecstatic.

Instead of basking in the glory, June stayed focused on her ultimate goal of making STEM education like hers more accessible. Mom was accepting congratulations and went on to say how happy she was to be able to launch the June Bacon-Bercy Scholarship for women. June later told the Washington Post, quote, 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-Bercy 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 Dale counts herself as a legacy of her mother's scientific profession. Her own successful STEM career has included both engineering and financial management. I embrace the scientific method because teaching me, in my case, how to think, that's been national my entire life.

Dale says her mother never really retired and never really wanted to, not until at age 89 she was diagnosed with frontal temporal 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 U.S. 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, NOAA, has already laid off hundreds of employees who do things like track hurricanes and make weather models more accurate.

Meteorologist Peggy Limon thinks June would have reacted strongly to these changes in government priorities, which run counter to her life's work. I think she would be talking to 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. And finally, what of June herself? How did she see herself in her life's work?

Reading one of June's letters, Dale tells us: She said, "I'm 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.

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. She said, in spite of everything, I'm still here. This episode was hosted by me, Carol Sutton Lewis. Christy Taylor was our producer, and Laura Eisensee was our senior producer.

Ali Gu to the sound design and mixing. Lucy Union composes all of our music. We had fact checking help from Lexi Atiyah. Special thanks to interns Sophia Levin and Shelley Way 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 Bertner. Our art was created by Lily Weir.

Thanks go to Jeff DelVisio and our publishing partner, Scientific American. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ann Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX. You can find our show notes and 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.

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