Lives Lost: Weatherman built career on skills learned in war

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — 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.

This November 1943 photo provided by his family shows Robert Fleury in his military uniform. Fleury served in World War II and parlayed the skills he learned in the war into a decades-long career with the National Weather Service. He died of complications from the COVID-19 coronavirus at a veteran’s home in Scarborough in his longtime home state of Maine at the age of 94 on April 21, 2020. (Family photo via AP)

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.

Like thousands of other veterans and elderly people in nursing homes around the country, Fleury was isolated from his family and friends when he died at 94 from the coronavirus.

He had been healthy and independent into his 90s, but a fall had complicated his medical condition.