In 1985, Professor Rick Church, the UCSB Chair of the Department of Geography, hired Einar Hovind (07/17/1926 – 12/09/2012) to teach Climatology (Geography 166). Professor Church attended Einar’s memorial service on December 29, 2012, and it is fitting that Einar be remembered in our departmental archives.
Who was Einar (the Viking) Hovind? Here are a few extracts from a touching bio sketch provided by his son, Tor Hovind, an Art Department Professor and head of the Graphic Art Design Program at California State University, Long Beach:
“My dad was a hero, the ‘real deal’… Here is a man who lived through WWII in Norway under the German occupation… German officers lived downstairs and family lived upstairs at his grandfather’s farm in Elverum, Norway. After the war, dad served in the Norwegian Air Force (under the meteorology wing)… His meteorology interest led him to the United States to study… So, he crossed the Atlantic on the S.S. Stavangerfjord ocean liner from Oslo to New York to pursue the American Dream… in which he flourished… My dad truly understood the meaning freedom and what it meant… With little money…he made his way by train and bus through New York, Chicago, small towns in Minnesota, and to Los Angeles…
Einar received his graduate degree from UCLA in meteorology and skied on their ski team… Ski jumping, downhill, giant slalom, slalom… the events that take ‘big brass ones’ to participate in… No ‘posers’ in this club… He skied Mammoth when it was only a rope tow and a snow cat…would cross country ski to the top of Cornice via the backside and ski down…wooden skies and bear trap bindings and knew Dave McCoy personally. Very different than the bump skis I have… He even went downhill skiing with his grand kids a couple of years ago and went on a 10-mile cross-country ski run at 7000-foot elevation this last spring. In his mid 80’s, he still was a strong Viking.
Upon graduation, he moved to Santa Barbara with my mom and eventually became the Vice President of North American Weather Consultants (NAWC)… The firm studied the Sierra Wave, forecasted for the Transpac Race, conducted EPA weather studies, and ran cloud seeding projects in Greece and throughout the United States. They even had a station on Ronald Reagan’s ranch in Santa Barbara… Einar loved the sciences (weather especially) and was also certified by the American Meteorological Society… If you asked him about how the weather…he would pontificate about cutoff lows, inversion layers, cumulonimbus clouds, and other meteorological principles… I would just go outside and look up to make my own forecast…
There are men on this earth and then there are heroes on this earth. My dad (the Viking) was one of them…”
Editor’s note: Einar Hovind’s formal obituary can be found here. Many thanks to Rick Church for suggesting this material.
