In Their Lives 11-8-53: Dang Weathermen!

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In this monthlong series I'm going through newspaper archives (more than a hobby, almost an obsession!), looking at things that happened on this date in the years that my family members were born. For today's headline, we travel back in time to 1953, when my dear mother of blessed memory was waiting to drop off a baby boy. Here's a headline from that day. 11/8/53: Unexpected Snowstorm Hits Northeast In the Navy, as I've said before, we called our meteorologists "weather guessers." There's a joke about the only two professions that can be bad 70% of the time and still make money are baseball players and meteorologists. They do, to their credit, do a splendid job on a number of occasions (the weathermen, not the baseball players ). I remember the deadly tornado outbreak on March 3, 2012: our local weathermen were talking for a week about how the setup was looking to be a potentially severe one. (And it was.) If you read Scott Anderson's daily weather event, "Yesterday's Weather Forecast, Today" you see he's never wrong! Today, even with all the satellites and modern computers and "modeling" and whatnot, the weathermen can still get it wrong. So how much easier was it for them to miss a "surprise" nor'easter that smacked the Jersey and New England coastline, bringing with it 20-foot high waves, winds, and snow that crippled transportation. Sixteen lives were lost in the storm, according to the newspaper account on this day in 1953. Also along with the report of the storm was an interesting sidebar: "Probe to See Why Storm Wasn't Forecast Ordered." No, it wasn't Congress, but the National Weather Service who ordered the investigation. Their excuse was, "The storm didn't behave as it was expected to." A very funny clip of "accurate weather forecasting":