June Bacon-Bercey (1928–2019) by Jessy Randall

December 2023 | Utopia Science Fiction Magazine

My UCLA advisor said, forget Meteorology –
major in Home Economics. I got an A
in Thermodynamics and a D in Home Ec.,
and I stuck to my own plan.
The weather’s unpredictable. In Buffalo, New York,
I landed my dream job when the former weatherman
was arrested for bank robbery. His name was Frank Benny
and he also hosted Bowling for Dollars. TV’s a strange place.
A few years later I won big on The $128,000 Question.
That money established a scholarship for women
to study atmospheric sciences, and that, my friends,
that is how you make it rain.

Originally published in the October 2022 issue of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and republished in our December 2023 issue.

Jessy Randall’s poems and stories have appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Nature, and Scientific American. Her most recent book is Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (MIT, 2022). She is a librarian at Colorado College and her website is http://bit.ly/JessyRandall.