In Memoriam

Bradford R. Bean '49 His childhood made him generous and understanding By Anne Downey '95G

Brad Bean '49 started stories about his childhood with "Well, out in back of the 'Castle'...," a wry acknowledgement of his social status. His success in later years was a result of his desire to better his lot. Blessed with an inquisitive mind, he found something he was good at and pursued it single-mindedly. He passed away in September from kidney disease.

He was born in Boston to a free-spirited, 17-year-old single mother who later became a nurse. His home life was unstable and he lived with relatives off and on throughout his childhood. Society's label that he was an "illegitimate" child drove him to make something of himself. Once, when he was 13, he was doing chores on a relative's property and stopped to take a break. He lay down near a stream and watched the clouds. Someday, he thought, I'm going to figure out what makes clouds float.

Bean put himself through UNH, where he majored in meteorology. He earned his room and board by working as a janitor at Pi Kappa Alpha, where he was a member. He also worked at the weather observatory in Conant Hall, taking hourly weather readings. He met his first wife, Ardis Dobrovolny '49, during Freshman Week. When their paths crossed again a year later, Bean said to her, "I've been looking for you!" "He swept me off my feet," Dobrovolny says. They married in 1949 and raised two daughters; they were divorced in 1979, and Bean later married Lila Lee Garrett, who died in 1998.

Bean worked in the radio meteorology section of the National Bureau of Standards (now NOAA), first in Washington, D.C., and then in Boulder, Colo. Over the course of his career, he earned both a master's degree and a doctorate in atmospheric physics and authored dozens of scientific papers and a textbook. His colleagues called his understanding of radio meteorology "visionary," and his publications continue to be cited both in the United States and abroad.

As the head of his lab, Bean studied the effects of weather conditions on radio propagation and the atmospheric bending of television and radar waves. He collaborated with scientists from all over the world—he spent a summer in Senegal flying into hurricanes to collect data. "My father had an intuitive feel for his work," his daughter Elmdea Bean says. "He explained to me once that air currents behave just like water. It wasn't just book knowledge that he had—it was an innate understanding."

Bean and Dobrovolny bought and renovated an old mining cabin in Fourmile Canyon in Colorado. Bean lived in it for 50 years. He went on weeklong hunting trips for elk and antelope on horseback. He grew a beard at the beginning of hunting season and wouldn't shave until he had bagged an elk. But he stopped hunting big game after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. "He told me that he wasn't able to look through the crosshairs anymore," Elmdea says.

Bean had a wide range of friends from all walks of life. "My dad loved people and he had scruffy carpenters for friends as well as scientists, people from all socio-economic levels," his daughter Rebecca Levy says. "He had a tough upbringing, but it made him generous in spirit and understanding about other people's challenges."

See a slideshow of photos of Bradford Bean '49.

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