Bernard Walsh Mehren was born on October 23, 1914 to Grace W. and Edward J. Mehren in East Orange, New Jersey. His early childhood and schooling was spent mostly on the East Coast from New Jersey to New Hampshire. He attended the University of Santa Clara in California then transferred to M.I.T. in Boston, receiving a degree in Chemical Engineering. After college, he worked for Crown, Cork and Seal in Philadelphia, then moved West to San Diego where he was chief chemist for the Squirt Bottling Co. Barney was schooled at the Institute of Meteorology at the University of Chicago in early 1944 and was assigned to the 11th Air Force in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska during World War II. He was a forward weather observer on numerous bombing runs over the Northern Kurile Islands in the Pacific. After the war he settled in the San Diego area where he raised a family and founded the PM Chemical Company, inventing many formulas for the cleaning industry. Barney and his wife Loraine with their four boys loved to travel throughout the West, Mexico and Canada, and in later years with Loraine, throughout the world. He is remembered for his beautiful singing voice, always humming a tune and performing with his church choir. Barney died at his home of 53 years in Rancho Santa Fe, California on May 29, 2009 surrounded by family at the age of 94.

John Mehren transcribed his father's (Bernard Mehren's) diary, written by Bernard during his assignments just prior to and while at Shemya, Aleutian Islands, AK during WWII. He and a fellow weatherman took notes describing the jet stream, and also helped develop single station weather reporting. He also invented/designed a slide rule used for weather calculations.

Bernard's diary is 23 pages in length, and has been formatted into a PDF document. You will be required to have Adobe's "Acrobat Reader" installed on your PC to view this document.

Click HERE to view Bernard's diary.