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, California, her family announced recently. She was 90.
Her daughter Dail St. Claire said the cause was frontotemporal dementia.
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, New York, WGR-TV (today WGRZ).
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.
"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," Bacon-Bercey was quoted as saying by The San Francisco Chronicle in 2000.
Other black women, among them Dianne White Clatto and Trudy Haynes, had delivered weather reports on television almost a decade before Bacon-Bercey did. But she was the first black woman to do so who was also a trained meteorologist.
Bryan Busby, the longtime chief meteorologist for the television stations KMBC and KCWE in Kansas City, Missouri, and an African American, said in a phone interview that "whether she was the first or not, she was one of the major African American pioneers on television, irrespective of gender."
In 1972, the American Meteorological Society awarded Bacon-Bercey its Seal of Approval, given for excellence in on-air meteorology.
A year later, she left WGR to become a public speaker. She later worked for the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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 composer John Philip Sousa.
Claire said she hoped to re-establish the scholarship in her mother's name, a provision of her will.
June Esther Griffin was born on Oct. 23, 1928, in Wichita, Kansas. She was mostly raised by an aunt and uncle, Edgar and Bessie Holbrook. She studied math at Friends University in Wichita before earning bachelor's and master's degrees in meteorology from the University of California, Los Angeles.