For 72 years, Francis Socey has enjoyed the weather

By John Wilson, Vintage Profile

        Francis J. Socey found his passion in life at the age of 12, and he's
been nurturing it ever since.
        Beginning with a thermometer placed under a rose rack in his hometown
of Altoona, Pa., the pre-teen began tracking daily temperatures, rain dates,
rainfall amounts and what the sky looked like.  His parents also gave him a
barometer then, a steady companion during his 72-year odyssey into meteorology.
        "My main interest in life - I can't get it out of my system - is
understanding weather," he said. Indeed he can't.  Sheets of statistics and
scientific data stack up like snowdrifts on tables and chairs, threatening
his Moran Creek view.  They include a century's worth of charts, maps, tables,
graphs and meticulously detailed notes on daily planetary alignments and
weather patterns.
        And the old barometer hangs on his wall.
        "I am contented now," he observed from his second-story waterfront
office/bedroom.  He lives with his daughter and son-in-law, Margaret
and Peter Fallon, off Taylors Creek Road.
        He's also still making singular, long-range and often accurate weather
predictions, based on historical correlations between the planets and the
weather here on earth.
        His data is everywhere, but that's only part of the picture.  Some has
been left with friends over the years - including 236 historic weather maps -
and some lost during his 20 or so moves.  There's also "a cellar full of just
my work," he said, noting that 262 boxes came with him when he moved to Lancaster
County in 1984.
        "I like to tell people about the weather, the reasons for it, and
communicate with young people," he said, adding that too much science is based
on theory when it should grounded in facts and statistics.  He's tried for
years to get a weather station built at the high school, he said, and shortly
after moving here he began submitting monthly weather forecasts to the
Rappahannock Record.  He's also spoken to students and several groups and
several groups, and in the past lectured at Linden College in Vermont.
        In 1983 he published Omega 2000, listing monthly weather predictions
through the year 1999.  His entry in it for January 25-28 of this year, when
the first rain and wind storm hit, noted severe weather and a dangerous
Atlantic coast storm; the entry for February notes heavy storms in the eastern
Pacific, and a general February 18 storm date.  He missed it by a day.
It stormed February 17.
        Socey is driven to communicate the climatic intricacies.
        "If we had hydroscopic vision, we would be able to see various kinds
of energy from all parts of the universe," he said, "but earth is not penetrated
by all of that energy" because of its protective shell.
        Planets are located on certain meridians, he explained, and when they
move a different set of harmonics is created. Socey charts the differences in
their degrees and declinations, notes their harmonics and then correlates the
findings to weather maps.  Data then is cross-referenced to times in the past
when similar alignments occurred.  Long-range forecasting is the result:
similar planetary harmonics can be expected to influence similar weather patterns,
he said.
        His data extends from 1898 to 2010, including daily planetary locations
written on some 51,000 index cards, he said.
        Despite his devotion to the cause, it took 25 years to be recognized
as a professional by the American Meteorological Society, he said. But then,
he took a circuitous route.
        Socey attended the College of Pennsylvania from 1936-40 but didn't
graduate due to a blindness for 18 months.  The causes were dietary, he said,
"just part of the circumstances," requiring huge doses of the B vitamins to
correct.
        On May 15, 1942, while inquiring about joining the service, Socey
found himself suddenly in it. Without money at the time he couldn't call home
and "didn't get dinner," he recalled; instead, he was on a train en route to
infantry training. After eight months he was transferred as a sergeant into
the weather service (where he had 15 years of experience), sent to
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was stationed in Puerto Rico.
        Discharged in 1946, Socey was working at West Chester Airport in White
  Plains, N.Y., in December of 1947 when he predicted, to a reporter, an otherwise
unpredictable heavy snowfall for the day after Christmas.  He had no real reason
to make the prediction or data to support it, he said, but 34 inches fell.
"I believe Somebody upstairs whispered to me," he said.
        Socey "got a lot of contacts and a lot of press... but no jobs," he
said.  He worked in sales and other fields over the years and otherwise "kept
at the weather," usually without payment.  Married from his service years until
1975, he's served as a consultant for a engineering firm studying typhoons in
Guam, and written for weather firms in Ohio, Washington, D.C., and Portsmouth.
        He's also dealt with prostate cancer lately, successfully using specific
combinations of vitamins to combat it.
        "Mother Nature was good to me," he said.
        So was his own mother, who never stopped his interest in science even
 though "she didn't understand it" when he'd routinely spend 20 cents for a
 huge, intricately detailed weather map, he added.
        "I have an interest in science, period," he said.
        And it's lasted a lifetime.

VINTAGE COMMENTS

Francis 1. Socey
Age: 84
Longevity secret: "God is the one who controls.  Live sensibly and eat well."
Favorite pastime: Weather analysis.
Advice to youth: "When you become interested in something, make sure your
parents help, regardless of what it is.'
Greatest influence: My mother, and Dr. Charles F. Brooks, who was affiliated
with Blue Hills Observatory in Milton, Mass.
Favorite TV show: Deep Space Nine; Mystery Theater.
Favorite book: Almost anything scientific.