![]() “I did not want to do weather on television, only because at that time I felt it was still gimmickry from women,” Bacon-Bercey told Robert Henson, author of Weather on the Air: A History of Broadcast Meteorology. ![]() In the 1950s and '60s, explains Langer of the Post, women who reported on the weather typically had little in the way of scientific training they were known as “weather girls,” and were sometimes required to wear bathing suits while informing viewers of temperature highs and lows. Though she was a professional meteorologist, Bacon-Bercey never intended to deliver weather news on air. She was hired as a science reporter at WGR-TV, a local NBC affiliate now known as WGRZ, in 1971. Atomic Energy Commission, where she studied fallout patterns caused by nuclear detonations. “I got a D in home economics and an A in thermodynamics.”īacon-Bercey with her aunt, Hortense Sapp, on the day she graduated from UCLA in 1954.Īmong other jobs, Bacon-Bercey worked at the National Meteorological Center in Washington, D.C. “When I chose my major, my adviser, who is still at U.C.L.A., advised me to go into home economics,” she told the Baltimore Sun in 1977, according to Slotnik. In 1954, she became the first African-American woman to earn a bachelor’s degree in meteorology from the University of California at Los Angeles, despite facing resistance along the way. “So, too, were black atmospheric scientists.”īut Bacon-Bercey had found her calling. It was an unusual suggestion at the time, “female meteorologists were practically unheard of,” writes Emily Langer of the Washington Post. Noticing her curiosity about water displacement and buoyancy, one Kansas teacher recommended that Bacon-Bercey pursue a career in meteorology, according to Roach. Claireīorn June Esther Griffin in 1928 in Wichita, Kansas, Bacon-Bercey took an interest in science at an early age. Right, posing on her Buffalo apartment terrace while working at WGR TV. “She was an important trailblazer in many ways,” Steve Cichon, who writes about Buffalo history, told the forecasting service. Slotnik of the New York Times.īacon-Bercey died in July at the age of 90, though her death was not widely known until John Roach of AccuWeather reported on it last week. She wasn’t the first African-American woman to deliver weather reports on television, but she was the first to do so as a trained meteorologist, according to Daniel E. It was a dramatic start to one of the defining chapters of Bacon-Bercey’s career. ![]() When the heat wave hit the next day, the job was mine.” “I already knew from my calculations there was going to be a heat wave. “All hell broke loose at the station,” Bacon-Bercey later recalled in an interview with Bill Workman of the San Francisco Chronicle. So management turned to June Bacon-Bercey, a reporter with a background in meteorology. Its main weather anchor had been arrested and charged with robbing a bank, and the station needed someone to report on the weather. In 1971, the Buffalo broadcast station WGR-TV was thrown into a tizzy.
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