CHARLES C. BATES

Charles C. Bates, Ph.D., succumbed at age 97 to the ravages of old age on July 9, 2016 while residing at the La Posada retirement complex, Green Valley, AZ.

Because his parents, Carl and Vera Bates, operated a hog/dairy farm near Rockton, IL, the youth spent much of each summer observing the south end of a team of horses going north or vice versa. Nonetheless, upon graduating as a Rector Scholar cum laude (geology) from DePauw University during 1939, he joined an Exxon subsidiary's seismograph crew and helped discover the Stuttgart oil field near Phillipsburg, KS. However, early 1941 found him to be a $21-per-month "buck private" computer in the "Old Army's" 2nd Field Artillery Observation Battalion's Sound Platoon at Fort Sill, OK.

Following the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor, it was upward and onward for Corporal Bates. After being commissioned as an Army Air Corps weather officer at the University of Chicago during May 1943, a year later found him being introduced to King George V and Queen Mary of the United Kingdom while on detached duty with the British Admiralty's Meteorological Forecast Center located two floors underground within London's Citadel. Then within the month he became the Center's duty surf forecaster for the night of the invasion of Normandy, i.e, June 5-6, 1944. For this feat, the Ninth Air Force awarded the Bronze Star Medal to the now Captain Bates for "meritorious serviceagainst the enemy during June 1944."

However, the global adventure continued. Within six months he was posted to the meteorological staff of the Commander-in-Chief, East Indies Fleet, in Colombo, Ceylon. But the war was moving north. Consequently, during June 1945, he led the first convoy of the 10th Weather Squadron over the famed Ledo-Burma Road between Chabua, India and Kunming, China. Once hostilities were over, Bates continued for the next third of a century in both a military and a civilian capacity with the Armed Forces. As a uniformed officer he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

In a civilian role, he held such key assignments as Chief, Vela Uniform Program, Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense (1960-64); Technical Director, U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office (1964-68), and Science Advisor to the Commandant, U. S. Coast Guard (1968-79). While doing so, he instigated the U.S. Navy's program for observing and forecasting ice conditions across the American Arctic, thereby meriting having an island in the Antarctic Peninsula named after him. In comparable fashion, Secretary of State Dean Rusk on Nov. 12, 1963 also designated him as U.S. Antarctic Observer #001 under terms of the Antarctic Treaty's Article VII.

Throughout Bates' professional career, he was ably supported by a life long soulmate, Pauline Barta, who passed away five months earlier in January 2016. He had wooed her while she was a perky kindergarten teacher in remote Holdrege, Nebraska and he a lowly "attached helper" on a transient seismic crew. Nonetheless, as of July 1942, they entered into 73 years of blissful marriage.

Once WWII was over, the couple created and reared three beloved daughters Nancy Ann, Priscilla Jane, and Sally Jean. Upon completing college, each girl married and went her own way, Nancy to Portland, OR, Priscilla to Austin, TX, and Sally to Tucson, AZ. During 1979 their parents also left the environs of Washington, D.C. to enjoy the desert climate of Green Valley, AZ. Once there, Charles co-authored several chronicles including "Geophysics in the Affairs of Man" (Pergamon Press, 1982), "America's Weather Warriors, 1814-1985" (Texas A&M Press, 1986), "Geophysics in the Affairs of Mankind" (Society of Exploration Geophysicists, 2001), and "Hydro to NavOceano: 175 Years of Ocean Survey and Prediction by the U.S. Navy" (Cornfield Press, 2006).

Survivors of Dr. Bates include his three daughters, grandsons Alexander C. Robinson of New York City and Brian B. Yanity of Fullerton ,CA and great-granddaughters, Monica P. Geniveve and Fiona Robinson of New York City. Five younger siblings also survive, namely, sisters Norma (Bates) Bloom, Lois (Bates) Peterson, and Rose (Bates) Lovejoy, plus brothers John and Roger Bates, all of Rockton, IL. He was preceded in death by his beloved wife, Pauline, and his grandson, David Yanity.

As for the cremains, they will be interred with those of wife Pauline's in the Phillips Cemetery adjoining the Bates Sesquicentennial Farm on which he was reared in Illinois.


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Published in Green Valley News & Sun on July 17, 2016




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