George Streator Templeton, Jr.
Like his cousin Marlin, "George Junior" had a way with a story.
Many of his favorite stories in later years were drawn from the interesting saga of his wartime service as a military meteorologist. Outside of Group Captain J.M. Stagg's weather prediction for June 6, 1944 over the English Channel, some of the the most significant work in meteorology was being done in the Pacific Theater during World War II. This is because, in guiding the high-flying B-29 Superfortresses' air war over Japan, Army Air Force meteorologists were the first scientists presented with unknown, high altitude winds. Learning about the Jet Stream, and finding out how to predict its flow was a wartime discovery that continued to echo through the science of meteorology and atmospherics thereafter.
George Streator Templeton, Jr., was born September 15, 1918, in Auburn, Alabama. His father was associated with the University of Alabama at the time of George Junior's birth. George Steator Senior's academic career and scientific study of agriculture and animal husbandry moved the family several times, with George Sr. finally ending up at Fontana, California.
George Jr. matriculated at the most prestigeous university in the State where he resided and, then, graduated with a baccalaureate degree in Physics and an advanced degree in Meteorology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in February of 1942.
His entire graduating class was immediately called on by the War Department.
"At that time, the Army had one (meteorologist) near Riverside in California and one at Hickam Field in Honolulu," he wrote. "That was all there was west of the Rockies. We were scarce as hen's teeth. A committee of three divvied us up, telling some, 'you'll join the Army,' others, 'Navy,' and me? 'You'll stay a civilian, and if you run off and get a commission you will be blackballed for the rest of your life. We have a job for you.'"
Within five days George found himself being assigned a Faculty Club roommate at New York University, still not knowing who he was working for, or what he was to be doing.
"Turned out, ten of us, one professor and one new graduate from each of the 5 Graduate Schools, were to develop the weather prediction system for operations over Europe - mostly air corps - and including [setting up for] D-day."
One afternoon soon after their arrival in New York, "The Boss" collected the group together and said, "'The army wants a manual to show what kind of clothing and equipment to use anywhere in the world; that is, a worldwide book on climate.' So he passed out chapters for us to critique.
"The one I got was on the tropics. I immediately recognized it as a British publication. They were great on their liquor ration! So I'm scanning, '... the ration in the tropics will be one gill per day.' Some G.I. clerk apparently did not know what a 'gill' was, so it had a line through the word and above was printed 'Quart.' [A "gill" is .142 litre — considerably less than 1/2 pint, and radically less than a Quart.. - Ed.]
"I looked at it and said, 'By God, I'm going to leave that alone!' Hence the bottle-per-day ration I found in the tropics!
"Later, I realized that I'm probably responsible for creating 50,000 alcoholics."
- o - o -
After being at NYU a couple of months, the Head Man sought him out, saying that there was a delegation coming up from DC to see him.
"About what?"
"They will tell you."
After dinner they sat down together.
George remembers, "There was a General in uniform and three others — they did not identify themselves — and they said, 'We are going to go into southwest China and we want you to tell us where to put the bases.'
"Me, fresh out of school and all of 23 or -4 years old!
"Well, I told them, and that's what they did."
- o - o -
There followed a series of postings and assignments that required a lot of transportation by air. George claims to never have known his security clearance.
"They wouldn't tell me, they said, for my own safety."
And, throughout the War, he never received written orders.
"Any G.I. on transfer would have 29 copies of orders. I had nothing. They always had my name down" on whatever list his name needed to appear on.
He relates the story of his leaving New York: "They called and told me I had four days to get out to Cal Tech to expand their operation in support of operations over Japan. 'Get your ticket down at Radio City,' they said.
"When I got [up] there, the place was empty — one gal at a desk. She looks me up and down and says, 'Don't you know you need a priority pass to get transportation?'
"'No,' I said.
"Just then the teletype started clattering away and she tore off the paper.
"'Is your name Templeton?' Her eyes were like saucers.
"Yes,' I answered.
"'Well, this will get you out to L.A.!'
"'Good.'
"'Don't you want to know what priority you have?' (She was going to tell me anyway.) 'A number 2!'
"'O.K.' (It meant nothing to me.)
"'I've never seen one before, [and] I've been here a year.'
"'What is it?' I asked.
"'It means the only ones that can bump you off a plane is the President of the United States or Members of his Cabinet!'"
The priority grade followed him throughout the war.
- o - o -
George was shipped to San Francisco when "somebody dropped a squadron of B-25's in the water short of Hickam. The forecasters were spooked, so [after that] the planes carried nothing but gas.
"Had to get that back on track."
- o - o -
His local Draft Board caught up with him in San Francisco.
When George alerted his superiors to his Notice, they demonstrated what the military could do when it had to: within a day, and despite the three hour time difference, a coded message went to Washington, DC, was decoded, processed, and a return message arrived back in San Francisco, was decoded and delivered to him. All this, on a Friday!
He was to appear at the Navy's office of "Officer Procurement" on Market Street the next day, with instructions to not tell them that his orders were waiting for him, but to pick up a commission.
"Saturday morning, I dropped in on the Marine Office of O.P. for a dry run. The guy asked, 'What can you do?' I said, 'Radar.'
"He looked in his book and said, 'It says here we can take you with one eye, one arm, and one leg.'
"I said, 'Thanks.'
"Then I sat down at the Navy desk. 'What do you want?'
"'Aerology.' [I replied.]
"'That's been closed a long time.'
"I said, 'Please look.'
"He had to look, and lo and behold! 'It's been opened up again ... take the exam.'
"Down the line the doctor said, 'What's this about a punctured ear drum?' I said. 'Yes.' He said, 'No.' I said, 'Ye-e-es.' He took a stethoscope and said, 'Blow. ... You flunk.'
"I ended up in uniform out there [in San Franciso]. Same uniform as tech reps — fix-it types, like from Lockheed, etc. Except the company reps had a shoulder patch to identify them. No patch for me. I wonder if anybody else ever applied for a Navy commission who definitely did not want one [as much as me]? I could see myself working under former students."
Through the rest of the War, in one pocket of his new Chief Warrant Officer's uniform, George carried a complete set of Army ID and a brown tie. In the other pocket, a complete Navy ID package and a black tie. "Whatever I had, there was nowhere that I went that I was ever stopped."
And, the commission papers he picked up satisfied his local draft board. But, he continued to be a civilian as far as he and his War Department bosses were concerned.
"Civilian" notwithstanding, he was shortly arriving at the Navy's John Rodgers Field on Oahu, Hawaii, assigned to write forecasts for 60,000 miles of air transport routes. One day, "I noticed an Army van pull up out on the field and put up their dishes. Why was an Army truck on a Navy base?
"Pretty soon a Lieutenant came looking for me by name. He said, 'I'm supposed to check you out on RADAR.'
"'Why?'
"'I don't know....'
"I played with it a day or two. A few days later, about noon, I was asleep in one of those 2-story Quonset BoQ's when a G.I. woke me up.
"'There is a general out in the hall who wants to see you.'
I wondered, 'why does an Army general want to see a civilian on a Navy base?'
"I sat up and said, 'Show him in.'
"It was a Two-Star General with one, repeat, one little service ribbon.
"I couldn't help it, I laughed out loud and said, 'What are you?!'
"Of course I knew him very well: he was Dr. Kaplan, head of my Physics Department, head of the Meteorology Department, and later Chancellor of the University [UCLA]. I had taken several courses with him.
"He answered, 'I am the Chief Science Advisor to the US Army and we want you to go out and fix a radar problem for the 6th fleet.'
"I said. 'I don't know anything about radar.'
"He said, 'That's O.K. Just go out and fix it anyway.'
"So here was an Army General on a Navy base ordering a civilian to go out and fix a Navy problem. It was a trip I'd never want to do again.
"They landed me on a 'Jeep' Carrier which is like crash landing on a postage stamp. Then, in a hand-held bosun's chair, I was dropped down to a destroyer. And, since I as assigned to staff, up again to a battleship. That was a mistake! I then asked to go to their biggest and newest carrier. So, it was back to the chair — all at 20 knots in open ocean.
"The problem [I was to 'fix'] was that the defensive distribution of the fleet depended on the forecast of the [next] dawn's radar range [in the] early A.M."
- o - o -
Some time later, back at John Rodgers Field, George got a chance to see the new Army Air Corps B-29 Superfortresses that were ferrying out to the Pacific for duty over Japan — up close and personal.
His first encounter came when, "I noticed a squadron of B-29's landing like you would toss a brick onto cement ... they were heavy.
"They parked these out in the middle of the field and put out guards. Pretty soon their Exec came looking for me by name. I asked him, 'how come you didn't land next door at Hickam? This is a Navy base.'
"He said, 'We had orders to land here in order for you to get us out to Guam.'
"'Why me?'
"'Because we will fly at altitudes never before flown in this part of the world.'
"I said, 'For that, you have to give me a tour.'
"So, we went out and climbed all over a B-29. They had full crew, ground crew, plus tools and parts, spare engine, and etc. They were heavy. The Exec said that their landing here at John Rodgers was only the 2nd normal landing he had ever made.
"'How's that?'
"He said, 'Our training has been so intensive that every other landing was some kind of emergency training exercise.'
"Those boys - the whole bunch from the 8th - were sharp. Not the usual high ranks showing up for desk jobs out of the 8th that did not want any part of any more war. I later learned that this was to be the A-bomb squadron."
Templeton eventually moved his operation over to the Army's Hickam Field. When he arrived, he was summoned by the base C.O., a One-Star.
"'I've instructions to give you quarters. Just who do you work for?'
"I said 'I really don't know. I never get anything on paper and my pay check is green with no name on it.' Result: I got a prewar officers house across from the Officer's club: 3 bedrooms, maids quarters enough for the rest of us.
"I should mention the enlisted men, aide-types, in the Forecast Center. In order to qualify for that work they needed a test score of 120 whereas for O.C.S. [Officer Candidate School - Ed.] you only needed a 110. As a result, I considered them to be head and shoulders above the officer group who just happened to hit it right in school. Every day getting off work they would have a jeep waiting to take me one block to my quarters. But we would go by the 'O' Club where I would buy a bottle plus a case to leave in the jeep.
"We got bumped out of the house in two months by a Two Star."
Such is life in wartime.
It wasn't long before George was "jerked out to Guam to get the B-29's started on bombing Japan."
There, he was billeted with the squadron that included Captain Tibbets, the pilot that was to drop the first atomic bomb.
The initial mission out of Guam to hit Japan was a disaster. The only bomb run allowed got just one 300 lb. bomb off. Templeton got called on the carpet by General LeMay. However, his prediction turned out to be "a good fest" as far as it went. However, it recurred that missions would pick up the coast and their ground speed would be zero! Because of that datum, the mission would be aborted.
Dr. Bjerkeness, his mentor at UCLA and, according to Templeton, "the father of modern meteorology," '... put the arm on me.'
"I postulated that what he called 'a confluence zone of high head winds' - the steady, high-altitude wind that's now called the Jet Stream, is what our pilots were hitting. We worked out a system where they could make the route lower to the south and climb later. The standard mission was to take off and fly at 700 feet for 700 miles and then start their climb. An engine failure, and they were in the water.
"Those B-29 pilots made good water landings and, with the first pressurized cabin [in a warplane], they'd float for a week! A destroyer was assigned to go around and pick up the crews and sink them."
- o - o -
Six months after the war, George Streator Templeton, Jr. was back in San Francisco, working for the United States Weather Bureau. He married Faith Meyers on April 25, 1946, and the couple had their first child, Robert Streator, on September 2, 1948. Janet Catherine Templeton followed on October 12, 1950.
After the war, George enjoyed priviledges to the Flight Station jump seat on any American commercial carrier, as well as "available space" on military transport for the rest of his life. And, while he was back in "civvies", the brewing Cold War and the need to continue testing the Atomic Bomb kept him involved in military affairs. He wrote his cousin, George Louis Templeton, of one voluntary trip he made soon after the War on the occasion of GLT and Elva's Baptist Mission assignment to Kodiak, Alaska:
"About December 10, '47 I bummed a ride from Travis to Anchorage. This was a B-29 recon mission. We flew 2/3 of the way over the ocean at 500 feet. That's as pleasant as pulling teeth. You have to sit on your survival kit all the time — that's a body bag-sized, individual life raft/immersion suit, Mae West, etc. The reason? At that altitude, if you loose an engine, you are IN the water.
"To move from the front of the B-29 to the midships cabin you climb up and lay on your back on a dolly and pull yourself through a tube over the bomb bay. Another crew member has to swap places and sit on your survival kit.
"Ending the trip, we pulled up over Kodiak and flew on up Kenai Peninsula to ANC at about 4,000 feet on a clear day, with me having a beautiful view from the bombardier's glass nose.
"From Anchorage, I hitch-hiked on a combat job to Fairbanks where I wanted to look at something. Saw a beautiful display of northern lights on the way, and caught another recon from there over the North Pole just to say I had been there. A four day round trip from San Francisco."
But his post-War service wasn't simply tagging along on Air Force reconnaissance flights on a "space available" basis when he had "something to look at" in the U.S. Territories. He concluded his service to the military in a much more critical role.
"In 1950, when the Russians got the A-bomb, the US started a series of tower test shots Northwest of Las Vegas. They said, 'we need your expertise on fallout. We want you to be controller for the shots. We'll give you notice of a shot. You tell us if the winds will comply to our specs, and, then in 24 hours, we will start the countdown.'
"Each countdown cost about $100,000.
"They said, 'You have authority to cancel any time up to 10 minutes before Zero. Keep your nose out of daily operations, stay detached.'
"Places like St. George, Utah, — one of the few small places in the - quote - 'thinly populated areas' — caught heavy doses of fallout. And cancer. But I was used to losses incidental [to operations].
"This lasted about a year. It was a real pain, as it was in addition to my regular work. We never canceled, so I saved the government $millions!
"After about a year, they said, 'We've got some Air Force types trained to take over.'
"I said, 'Great.'
"But, on the next shot they called me as usual. I said, 'Forget it! I'm out of it.'
"They said, 'tell us anyway.'
"[After checking the conditions], I said, 'Don't do it.'
'"They did it anyway.
"That radiation cloud turned and went down right over L.A.! I was tickled pink.
"There was never a peep in the press!"
He was "tickled" that he'd been right: fallout DID drift across Los Angeles. And, the military's ability to suppress nuclear-related controversies in the name of National Security was just 'par for the course' as far as George Junior was concerned.
George Streator Templeton, Jr., went on to have an 34-year career with the United States Weather Bureau, first in San Francisco, California, and then Suitland, Maryland. He retired to Grants Pass, Oregon where he lived for a number of years.
In July, 1999, his son, Robert, brought him to Clinton, South Carolina to live at Langston House in order to be close to his family.
He died on November 30, 2001, at Laurens County Hospital.
Photo — George Streator Templeton, Faith Meyers Templeton, "Bobby" (Robert) Templeton, South San Francisco, Dec. 1948.
Notes
1. 0108 GLT-RMT
Papers, "George Streator Templeton, Jr. Obituary," unknown, 2001.
2. 0024 FHT-GLT Papers, "George Streator Templeton, Jr. letter to George
Louis Templeton," 1989.
3. 0085 GLT(FHT), "Letter from George Streator Templeton", 1981.
4. 0108 ..., ibid.
Also: Letter from George S. Templeton, Jr. to Robert Vincent and Betty Templeton, 1981.
