Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [29]
IT WAS NOT enough for Isaac to do merely what General Greely asked of him. He saw in his transfer to Galveston “great opportunities for the utilization of my recreation time.” Although his colleagues might have been inclined to ask, what recreation time?
On August 24, 1889, his second daughter arrived. He and Cora named her Rosemary. They hired help, most likely. Everyone did. But a baby was still a baby. There were diapers but no washing machines. The nights were hard, the days tiring. As for Isaac’s work life—the Galveston office was in disarray. Isaac was under orders not just to fix it, but also to start the new Texas-wide weather service. For most men, all this would have been quite enough. But in 1893 Isaac joined the faculty of the University of Texas medical school, based in Galveston, as an instructor in medical climatology, and during the year delivered thirty lectures on topics ranging from the fundamentals of measuring barometric pressure to the role of climate in pneumonia, malaria, and yellow fever. He also enrolled in Add-Ran Male and Female College, today’s Texas Christian University, and began studying toward a doctorate in philosophy and sociology. He taught the young men’s Sunday-school class at the First Baptist Church.
He quickly turned the Galveston office into a showpiece. On November 13, 1893, an inspector named Henry C. Bate paid a visit to the Galveston office, the first inspection since the transfer of the weather service in 1891 to the Department of Agriculture, which formally named it the Weather Bureau. Isaac, Bate wrote, “was exceedingly popular with everyone … The service has few such men in the field—none better.” Bate provided the underlining.
By then, Isaac’s brother, Joseph, had joined the bureau. Unlike Isaac, he had drifted toward weather. He taught school in Mount Vernon, Tennessee, for twenty-five dollars a month but quit to move to Galveston to become a salesman, or “drummer,” for a printing company and quickly earned a reputation as being just about the only salesman in town who did not drink. He earned sixty dollars a month, but Galveston was a lot more expensive than Mount Vernon and he soon found he was saving less money. He joined a locomotive machine shop operated by the Gulf Colorado Railroad, but remained for less than two months. The fact Isaac hired him was evidence that for the moment the men were still close, still friends. At the time of Bate’s inspection, Joseph was twenty-two years old and earning $840 a year, his best salary yet. Bate gave him a total score of 8.8, but noted his penmanship was “somewhat difficult.”
In his concluding remarks, Bate wrote that the Galveston force was overtaxed and badly served by headquarters. “I don’t think there is a station in the United States that gives out near the amount of information daily and weekly as this, and I am quite sure there is none where the value of the Service and this information is more genuinely appreciated than here.” Yet few stations, Bate wrote, “are so poorly provided with office comforts and facilities—I hope the Chief will give this matter his favorable consideration.”
A NEW CHIEF took over the bureau, Mark W. Harrington, the former editor of a meteorological journal. He continued Greely’s campaign to reduce public skepticism about the bureau’s ability to do much beyond simply recording changes in the weather. At the time of Harrington’s appointment, Isaac wrote, “weather forecasting was nothing more than a listing of probabilities.” Even something as basic as predicting the temperature twenty-four hours in advance was considered so likely to result in failure and public ridicule that the bureau forbade it. This prohibition frustrated Isaac Cline. He believed he understood the weather. He understood the rippling of isobars across the plains. Weather could be strange, but never so strange as to elude scientific explanation. Isaac had experienced tornadoes,