Papers of Eleanor Stabler Brooks, 1910-1959

Eleanor Stabler, daughter of Edward Lincoln Stabler and Elizabeth Tubby Stabler, was born September 9, 1892. The Stablers were Quakers and lived first in Brooklyn, New York, and then in Greenwich, Connecticut. Eleanor attended Radcliffe, graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude in biology in 1914, and was the winner of the Jonathan Fay Prize. At Harvard she met Charles Franklin Brooks, meteorologist (Harvard A.B. 1911, A.M. 1912, Ph.D 1914) and they married in June 1914.

Charles Franklin Brooks (1891-1958) was the son of Morgan Brooks, professor of engineering at the University of Illinois-Urbana and Frona Marie Brooks, who did graduate work at the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College), 1884-1886. Frona and Morgan Brooks had eight children, five of whom attended Radcliffe and Harvard including their daughter Frances Brooks Colcord, classmate of Eleanor Stabler Brooks.

Charles Franklin Brooks worked in the United States Department of Agriculture on the Atlas of American Agriculture (1914-1915); he was then instructor in geography at Yale University (1915-1918). After service during World War I with the United States Army Signal Corps in Texas, he returned to Washington to edit the Weather Bureau's Monthly Weather Review (1918-1921). He was appointed associate professor of meteorology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts (1921), full professor (1926), and he remained at Clark until 1931. From 1931 until 1958 he was professor of meteorology at Harvard University and director of the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory. He was largely responsible for founding the American Meteorological Society in 1919, remaining its secretary until 1954 and editing its bulletin until 1938.

The Brooks had seven children, five of whom attended Harvard and Radcliffe. Brooks home schooled the children until the family moved to Milton, Massachusetts. Brooks and the children spent summers at Silver Lake, New Hampshire corresponding frequently with Charles Franklin Brooks who remained at home to work and teach. Together they wrote Why The Weather? (1924). After the death of her husband in 1958, Brooks lived with her sister Anna Bunker Stabler (Radcliffe Class of 1923). Brooks died in New Haven, Connecticut in 1986.