The Wind & the Public

In 45 years as a weatherman--five of them as chief meteorologist for the city of New York--Benjamin Parry has seen vast improvements in weather predictions and weather service. The Weather Bureau (which once closed up shop every night at 10) now gives 24-hour service, predicts minimum & maximum temperatures, wind velocities, and types and volume of precipitation.

Its telephone switchboard answers 50,000 calls every 24 hours, with recorded weather information. It operates a teletype system which supplies 38 radio stations and 30 newspapers with predictions. It recently started a radio facsimile transmission service, which sends weather maps within a 70-mile radius of the city. Though still far from perfect, its information has improved in accuracy immensely during the three decades of Parry's service in New York.

But last week as he prepared to retire, it seemed that these improvements had only increased the hoots, catcalls, and cries of anguish amid which he has done his work. The New Yorker is a creature who feels that the weather ought to be regulated rather than predicted: there is evidence that he believes Parry controls a fiendish mechanism which causes rain whenever he plans a weekend at the beach, or snow when he parks his automobile in the street.

When he has the public, as well as wind and rain in his hair, Parry takes comfort from a poem pinned on the wall of the New York Weather Bureau.

As we approach life's grey December,

These, in the main, are our regrets:

When we're right, no one remembers;

When we're wrong, no one forgets.

But as his career approached its end, he confided that he had never quite been able to reconcile himself to one aspect of working in Manhattan. "New York's weather," he said, in a rare departure from his usual calm scientific detachment, "is lousy."

At week's end the weather obligingly backed him up; a swirling storm hit the city, and dumped the third-deepest snowfall in history (19.6 in.) on its streets and rooftops. Parry beamed. In one hour, at the height of the storm, 3 1/2 inches fell. The Weather Bureau predictions (unlike those issued before last December's record-breaking 25.8-in. snowfall) had been uncannily accurate, a fact which enabled the city to keep its streets open, its buses running, its sidewalks passable, and its citizens in such a mild state of discontent that they seemed almost happy.

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