Allen Lee '60 

I'm one of those not born in Sheridan. My birth occurred in the small North Dakota town of Maddock where my Dad owned a bowling alley. The folks wound up there after several failed crops on the farm near Willison, ND. WWII had started, and I suspect the bowling business wasn't doing too well with men going into the service, so my folks went to Red Lodge to work a farm with my grandparents, then moved to Sheridan when Dad got a job with the railroad.

We lived in an apartment at the Wilson's house on South Tschirgi Street after the draft took Dad to an Army Railroad Battalion in France and Germany. There were several family names I remember from our time on the hill: Wilson, Holstead, Manning, George, Church, Miss Guyer (a teacher at SHS), etc. After the war Dad again worked for the railroad but the uncertainty of on-call work made him decide to buy a cafe at 360 N Main. Lee's Cafe was our life from then on. (They later moved it to the shopping area across from the flour mill.)

When brother David was born we moved to Illinois street where I attended Coffeen School and met another set of lifelong friends: Gracey, Lehr, Baker, Hale, Martini, Hicks, and the list goes on. Junior High brought me together again with some of the people I knew from Tschirgi and High School added new friends from Holy Name. It is surprising to me how little we interacted with each other except in our small groups in the neighborhood until thrown together in High School.

I was attracted to science mostly through the interaction of teachers: Mr. Ruzicka in Jr. Hi., Mr Thomas Allen (biology), Mr. Popovich and Mr. Cloyd (math) and an interest in music from Mr. Avery. (Popovich was probably the most profound teacher I remember because he told me I was capable of being an excellent student if I wasn't so lazy - he was right.)

Mr. Lodge was leading an after-school program on Radiological Monitoring (it was the 50s, remember) and sent me up to the weather service to get info on fallout winds. I fell in love with the science of Meteorology. I changed my Senior year courses from basketweaving to Physics and Math and set my sights on a degree in Meteorology.

After two years at Sheridan College and I transferred to Texas A&M, one of the few schools at the time that taught Meteorology and didn't have -40 degree winters. I also worked for the National Weather Service during the summer at Sheridan for two years, Dodge City KS and Kansas City MO for other summers.

After graduation I went to work at Kansas City (National Severe Storms Forecast Center) for three years, then to Silver Spring MD at the Weather Service Headquarters where I met my bride. We later moved to Columbia SC, then to Little Rock Arkansas where I was the Forecast Office manager (Meteorologist in Charge). After 36 years of federal work, 19 of them in Little Rock, I retired.

I now do consulting: Specialized forecasts, expert testimony for legal stuff.

While in Little Rock I became widely known since the TV people came out to the office everytime there was severe weather. That led, in a roundabout way, to getting some work on commercials after I retired, although nobody ever recognizes me as the weather guy since I seldom wear a suit and tie. I also was cast in a movie directed by Billy Bob Thornton, an Arkansas native (Daddy and Them - it's going direct to video on Showtime for Jan 2003. Never did get to the big screen.) But I did make CNN and the Discovery Channel in other weather-related stuff.

I've done some work with local theater groups doing sets, lights, and acting which keeps me busy periodically. I've written one novel and screenplay (unpublished), won several writing competitions at author conferences, and have a non-fiction I'm trying to place at the time.

One of my favorite activities is doing computer programming of various types. Something I found out when I was working at the weather service, where I wrote a ton of operational programs: The laziness that Mr. Popovich identified makes you a good computer programmer – you'll spend hundreds of hours working on a program just figure out a way to automate some boring, repetitive thirty-second task at work.