In The Clouds

Strange and unusual. My father once used those words to describe his career as a meteorologist. Some people are surprised to discover meteorology is regarded as a science, and for that, I blame The Weather Channel. Because, hey. Do smart scientific-minded people willingly go into places others have been told to evacuate? Crazy people perhaps, but scientists?  

Dad wasn’t a television personality broadcasting from a fancy studio or one of those aforementioned “crazies,” the ones who smile-talk while being hammered by hurricane-force winds and brutal rain bands, all in the service of accurate reporting (although, I will say we owe them a debt of gratitude). My father, Alonzo Smith, worked in obscurity as a weather officer in U.S. Air Force, then as an executive for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He was also one of the country’s premier Black meteorologists at a time when Black rarely preceded the word, scientist.

Coming of age in 1930s Harlem, Dad was already a bookish science-nerd when, one day in class, he learned clouds had names. Cirrus. Cumulus. Cumulonimbus. His fascination took off like a plane in the stratosphere, but aspiring to be a scientist in Harlem required a Herculean focus since the voice of easy money bellowed out in the midst of gripping poverty.

Racketeers and drug peddlers were street-corner businessmen. Gang members used the term “social club” in their recruiting efforts. Swindlers, who’d mastered Three-Card Monte, did their swindling. However, Dad was determined to navigate around this enticing mix of people, even as some of his friends fell prey. Yet, sometimes deception came from within his classroom.

“Negro children shouldn’t go to school because you’re going to end up being janitors and bus drivers, anyway,” Dad’s white teacher told her Black students one day.

Fortunately, Dad was being raised by his Grandma Jo, who was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Like many in her generation who’d migrated from the South, she couldn’t read or write but she possessed good instincts and she protected my father like a lioness safeguards her cubs. No one was going to mess with her grandson’s education. After Dad told her what his teacher said, Granny Jo marched over to the school and gave the teacher a piece of her mind. That incident cemented Dad’s lifelong dogged determination. If anyone told him he couldn’t do something, that served as motivation to prove them wrong.

In his late teens, my father was drafted into the Navy and served in the South Pacific during World War II. After being discharged, he enrolled at Howard University, a historically Black institution in Washington, DC, where he majored in mathematics and joined the Air Force ROTC Program. As fate would have it, some groundbreaking war veterans were instructors in the Department of Military Sciences. These men coined The Tuskegee Airmen, were not yet the heralded Black fighter pilots they would come to be known as, and many of them sought teaching positions only because they were denied jobs as commercial pilots upon returning home from the war.

One of these men, Captain Robert Smith, encouraged Dad to secure a spot in the Air Force’s weather forecasting school, an eighteen-month intensive training program. Dad applied and was accepted into the program at New York University. His strange and unusual career began in 1952, and he never looked back.

As a weather officer, my father traversed Europe in support of military pilots who flew jumbo transport jets and planes designed for airlifts. He gathered and analyzed raw atmospheric data to issue storm warnings and create flight plans, the blueprints for getting from one location to another safely. Meteorologists applied thermodynamics and complex mathematical calculations to the process of flight planning, and back in the 1950s, this type of number crunching was done manually. It was tedious work that demanded accuracy, but my father had found his purpose.

What’s heartbreaking, is that once he returned to the states, even with his status as a war veteran and military officer, he had to navigate around Jim Crow, just like he had to tiptoe around the gangs in Harlem. The Air Force assigned him to several cities and towns over the years, yet he (and my mother) was often tasked with securing off-base housing and finding accommodations on long road trips while being victimized by discrimination. Often, VACANCY signs mysteriously went dark after my parents pulled into a motel parking lot, or shameless landlords would proudly announce they didn’t rent to Negroes.

Growing up, I heard many stories like this. However, the narration of my father’s life, his demonstrations of strength and perseverance, have always filled me with pride. Like when he was stationed at Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The base had no runways because planes weren’t needed there. This was the early 1960s at the height of the Cold War, and Warren was headquarters for the maintenance and operation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) located in underground silos across the region; the first of their kind deployed in the U.S. My father was handed the monumental task of converting empty office space into a weather command center, one that would provide round-the-clock forecasts should any of the missiles need to be launched. Using every ounce of resourcefulness he could muster over the course of several weeks, my father established the first-ever weather center at Warren.

I believe this significant accomplishment rendered him a victim of his own success because his next assignment took him to the Air Station on Shemya Island, Alaska, one of the worst, unpredictable weather areas on planet Earth in one of the most remote places in the U.S. I’ll just go out on a limb and say that most people have never heard of Shemya. That’s how the U.S. government wanted it during the Cold War.

Situated on the extreme western end of the Aleutian Island chain, Shemya is roughly 200 miles from Russia. The island served as a sentinel for American surveillance activities and it was a critical refueling stop for Air Force pilots who flew top-secret air missions. Here, Dad completed an isolated tour, meaning he was away from his family for one long year. While Shemya was arguably the least desirable assignment in the Air Force, this is where the most skilled, reliable weather forecasters were needed.

During his career, my dad received a master’s degree in meteorology from The Pennsylvania State University in 1960, the only Black student in his graduating class. Although this was an amazing accomplishment, I know he wanted more. Unfortunately, he was shut out of the school’s Ph.D. program for reasons he believed were racially motivated. As well, he was denied other job assignments and promotions that he worked hard for and tried to obtain.

Even with the disappointments, Dad went on to make important contributions toward the advancement of weather forecasting during the nascent computer age, and just prior to retiring from the military, he received the Air Force Commendation Medal for his work involving computerized flight plans.

After his second retirement from NOAA in 1986, he dedicated his life to mentoring young people of color who aspired to be mathematicians and scientists. He even took on the often-dreaded job of substitute teaching at the high school level. I still laugh at how he told stories about the shocked and perplexed looks students gave him when he showed up in their classes and began writing algebra equations on the board instead of wheeling out a film projector.

My father passed away in 1999 at the age of 74, and I often wonder if he thought about the teacher in Harlem who implied he wouldn’t amount to anything. I’ll never know the answer to that, but I do know this. Because he defied that teacher, Dad not only helped to shape how the weather is forecasted today, but he also opened doors for many Black children and gave them permission to dream big and keep their heads in the clouds.