(a page in process)

1. First event: Birth July 1, 1919 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

2. First word: I'm told I used to stand holding on to the windowsill, watching the morning street activities below. One of the first notable events was the approach of the horse drawn wagon selling the refrigeration supplies of the day. The driver was stopping at most of the houses yelling ICE. So my first word was the unconventional word "ICE". A proper start for a Cloud Physicist / Meteorologist.

*Bob with Grandfather Emmanual Pilpel and Grandmother Cecile Meyer Pilpel*

3. At age 10 I started taking weather observations twice a day, a habit that continues to this day. My other hobby that developed early was carpentry - In the first grade in Shady Hill school each member of the class built their own house, full scale for our size (6' by 4' by 4'), I remember it lasted in the backyard for over a year. Later I built the house in Lincoln, Massachusetts where I raised my family and have lived for nearly 60 years.

Bob with his brother Bill on the lap of his mother, Minkie (Mildred Pilpel Cunningham)

4. I remember in high school at Cambridge School of Weston, Bill Gross discussing Bowdoin's new summer bird experimental station on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy. He was suggesting that high school students could be very helpful to the college students doing specific bird studies. I was entranced by the prospect and suggested I could run a background project for all by recording weather information. I spent the next three summers on the Island; the second and third summers I paid my board and room by milking a cow as well as doing the weather and collecting fog water. The founding of the Bowdoin Kent Island Scientific Station is well recorded in a book by Keith Ingersoll, "Wings over the Sea". #1. The establishment of the Kent Island weather station is documented by John Conover in a book entitled "The Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory: The First 100 Years-1885-1985 (see p209). Ref. 2.

Bob with his Grandfather, Emmanuel Pilpel

With the beginning of the Canadian WW11 Bowdoin was considering closing the Kent Island Station. I and two other MIT freshman, Fred Sargent and Charles Ruckstuhl, had plans to be on Kent Island part of the summer of 1939. We traveled to Bowdoin and had a meeting with the President to discus these plans. We convinced him to let us continue our work on Kent for at least another summer, The MIT summer.
I continued the wx observations and fog water sampling, while Fred ran a project comparing the effect of cold fronts on human chances of caching a cold. This was a repeat investigation of a study he made in Exeter Acd where the cold front brought in cold air but on Kent Island in the summer the reverse happens. We arranged for a Med Doc to do the blood testing. Charley was very active with all the amateur radio equipment that included broadcasts that were setup with a Portland Maine commercial station. .