PORTLAND, Maine – Robert Fleury knew he wanted to serve his country when he was a teenager, so he signed up for one of the most remote assignments in World War II — tracking the weather for the U.S.
Navy in the frigid Aleutian Islands off Alaska.He would later parlay the skills he learned in Quonset huts along the Bering Sea into a decades-long career with the National Weather Service.
In Portland, Maine, where he and his wife moved after the war, the friendly, good-natured Fleury would take it in stride when he occasionally botched a forecast and was teased by town golfers after it rained on their game. “He would engage everyone with a funny little smile," Bob Fleury said of his father.