#FEMALE METEOROLOGIST TV#

“When I chose my major, my adviser, who is still at U.C.L.A., advised me to go into home economics,” she said. Beloved Fox TV meteorologist and mother-of-two, 35, kills herself a month after telling fans she was struggling to recover from laser eye surgery which she got to finally be able to stop wearing. In 1977 she told The Baltimore Sun that some of her instructors had not taken her interest in science seriously because of her gender. Inspiring the next generation of female meteorologists March 29, 2021, 4:33 PM AccuWeather's Dexter Henry connects with a meteorologist who is inspiring young women with her work. June Griffin studied math at Friends University in Wichita before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in meteorology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in the mid-1950s. She was mostly raised by an aunt and uncle, Edgar and Bessie Holbrook. Her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried and moved to Florida. And you’ll probably notice that there’s only one. Claire said she hoped to re-establish the scholarship in her mother’s name, a provision of her will.ĭorothy Tucker, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists and an investigative reporter for CBS News in Chicago, wrote in an email that “June Bacon-Bercey was the personification of the word trailblazer” and that she had “opened doors for not just people of color but women in meteorology and broadcast.” While some of these meteorologists names are weather- or topography-related, others are just plain ridiculous (and yes, a couple are stage names).

She also endowed a scholarship through the American Geophysical Union for women to study atmospheric sciences, drawing on her $64,000 in winnings earned in 1977 on the game show “The $128,000 Question.” She had successfully answered a string of questions about the composer John Philip Sousa.Ī dozen women received money for tuition through the scholarship from 1978 to 1990. When the heat wave hit the next day, the job was mine.” “I already knew from my calculations that there was going to be a heat wave. Bacon-Bercey was quoted as saying by The San Francisco Chronicle in 2000. “All hell broke loose at the station when our weather guy robbed the bank, and they needed someone who was there to fill in for the day,” Ms. She became an on-air meteorologist a year later, after the station’s weather anchor was arrested and charged with robbing a bank to pay off gambling debts. Bacon-Bercey had worked as a meteorologist at WRC-TV in Washington - though without delivering weather forecasts on the air - when she was hired in 1971 to be a reporter for an NBC affiliate in Buffalo, N.Y., WGR-TV (today WGRZ). Claire said the cause was frontotemporal dementia. June Bacon-Bercey, who by many accounts became the first African-American woman to deliver the weather on television as a trained meteorologist, died on July 3 at a care facility in Burlingame, Calif., her family announced recently.

Female meteorologist