Among the little things I inherited with the passing of my dad is what may yet prove to be a lifetime supply of No. 3 pencils, all embossed with his name, business and address. They’re modest, durable, and reliable—just like the man himself.
when family and the heavens aligned
With two sons living in the path of totality for the 2024 solar eclipse, we had very convenient accommodations and parking in Rochester, NY for the long-anticipated event. Too bad the weather covered the sun’s tracks!
But the trip was not wasted by any means! Our whole family was able to gather for a couple of days of fun togetherness.
The weather the day before the eclipse was crystal clear, and we immersed ourselves on the very blue edges of Lake Ontario. We were even treated to a superior mirage of the distant lake’s surface appearing above the horizon. Looking like an ethereal highway bridge, the apparition spanned a good portion of the northern vista. (A superior mirage appears when the air below the line of sight is colder than the air above it. Light rays passing through that difference in atmospheric density are bent downward, so the image appears above the actual object.) My poor-quality photo was produced from my zoomed-out handheld iphone camera.
Back at our youngest son’s house, the spring peepers were in full voice in a very picturesque pond.
Eclipse day enticed us to Rochester’s Cobb’s Hill Park with a few thousand others who assembled downslope from its hilltop water reservoir. Knowing that the high cirrus that greeted us in the morning would likely thicken and lower by the afternoon’s celestial meet-up, I must say we managed our expectations well. There was a bit of a holiday festival air about the crowd, despite the looking-up let-down.
At 4:09 pm, just as predicted, totality, totally hidden above a thick deck of stratocumulus, plunged our dim world into darkness. Despite not seeing the disks of the sun and moon, it was just as thrilling!
In commemoration of the special event, son Andrew created a limited edition patch on his embroidery machine: for when the sun and the moon and the clouds and the family aligned in New York in 2024.
celebrating a legacy
I was a highly impressed freshman meteorology student when I first met the dean of Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Charles Hosler. He regaled us with stories from when he was a professor of meteorology in the 1950s and 60s, conducting then-cutting-edge experiments in weather modification. He confessed that if it rained after an experiment, it was tremendously difficult to tell if was due to the experiment, or it would have rained anyway! So the experiments were abandoned, but not before he had aroused fierce opposition from local farmers who attributed everything they didn’t like about the weather to him and Penn State—even accusing the university of flying a black airplane at night to seed the clouds when no one would notice. Once he was even shot at.
Dean Hosler, as I knew him, died last November at the age of 99. Today, I attended the Celebration of Charles Hosler’s Penn State Life and Legacy on campus, in the building that used to house the weather tower on the eighth floor when I was a student (and which is connected to what is now named the Hosler Building).
In the college’s announcement of his passing, it noted that “Hosler was one of the early titans of weather forecasting. He created one of the first television weather shows when he started broadcasting weather forecasts from Penn State in 1957, with a goal of providing more accurate weather forecasts for Pennsylvanians.”
Dr. Hosler received many awards for his research and administrative excellence over his long career. After serving 20 years as dean of the Earth and Mineral Sciences College, he became Penn State’s senior vice president for research and the dean of the Graduate School, and acting executive vice president and provost before retiring in 1992. I was glad to have been inspired by his example and earn my degree under his leadership in the atmospheric sciences.
