On the afternoon of September 14, 1919 Clyde Simpson struggled to carry his 6-year-old son through the flooded streets of downtown Corpus Christi as the most deadly hurricane in the city's history moved onshore.
They first tried to reach the elementary school where the boy had just registered as a first grader. Unable to get to the school, they managed to reach the safety of the Nueces County Courthouse, three blocks away, and rode out the storm there with many others. (All those who had taken refuge at the school drowned as the building collapsed upon them).
One member of the Simpson family drowned during the storm, but Clyde Simpson, his wife, and young son survived.
That experience made a long-lasting impression on 6-year-old Robert Simpson. He was to have a lifelong fascination with the weather....especially with hurricanes.
He would graduate near the top of his class from Corpus Christi High School in 1929 and go on to receive a degree in physics from Southwestern in 1933 and an MS in physics from Emory University in 1935.
So, what does one do in the middle of the Great Depression with a Master in Physics? Exactly what he was forced to do....teach school.
He returned home and took a job as the Director of Music at Corpus Christi High School. However, in 1939, he achieved the highest score in the state of Texas on the Civil Service Exam (96.52), and in April, 1940 accepted a position with the U. S. Weather Bureau in Brownsville.
When World War II arrived in 1941, he was assigned to the Weather Bureau in New Orleans. He was keenly aware of the importance of weather forecasting during wartime and was instrumental in creating the Army Air Force Weather School to improve forecasting.
It was during this time that Simpson made his first flight into the eye of a hurricane aboard an Air Force "hurricane hunter" aircraft.
After the war, his work landed him a position at the Weather Bureau Headquarters in Miami. It was here that he constantly requested funding for hurricane research....funding that never came due to tiny weather bureau budgets.
That all changed with a devastating 1954 hurricane season.
Sixteen storms that year resulted in over $750 million in damages (a record) and took the lives of 1,069 people. The funding for hurricane research suddenly became available!
In 1955, Robert Simpson was appointed director of the newly created National Hurricane Research Project in Washington, D. C., a position he held for four years. In 1959, he resigned to pursue his doctorate at the University of Chicago....which he obtained in 1962.
He then returned to Washington to become the Weather Bureau's Deputy Director of Research, helping to establish the National Severe Storms Laboratory.
In 1968, he was named Director of the National Hurricane Center, a post he held until his retirement in 1974. During that time, he implemented satellite tracking of all tropical and sub-tropical storms and vastly improved the Hurricane Hunter squadrons.
His greatest contribution was the creation of the now famous Saffir-Simpson Hurricane scale. Along with fellow meteorologist, Herbert Saffir, the two developed a method of categorizing storms to better predict their potential severity. Categorizing storms using the Saffir-Simpson model (on a scale of 1 to 5) is still used to this day.
Countless lives have been saved by the Weather Bureau's ability to provide early warning of the most severe storms.....and the work of that little boy from Corpus Christi who survived the 1919 hurricane.
Dr. Simpson retired from the Weather Bureau in 1974. He and his wife joined the faculty of the Environmental Sciences Department at the University of Virginia, where they taught for many years.
Dr. Simpson passed away on December 18, 2014 at the age of 102. Few Corpus Christi natives have had a greater impact on the safety and well-being of people worldwide than Dr. Robert H. Simpson.
Robert Parks is a special contributor to KRIS 6 News. Parks was a history teacher at Carroll High School for 19 years and is now retired. His knowledge of Corpus Christi history makes him a unique expert in the subject.
