(I posted the whole story here because you have to be a member to get stories off the Miami Herald web site)
What's in a name? For Miami woman, a hurricane
Meet the Miami woman who lent her name to Hurricane Jeanne. Jeanne Van Wyck's friend, former National Hurricane Center senior forecaster Gilbert Clark, submitted her name a quarter-century ago.
BY HOWARD COHEN
Miami Herald
Behind every great hurricane, there's a . . . woman?
In this case, there is a real Jeanne behind Hurricane Jeanne. She's Jeanne Van Wyck, a member of the First United Methodist Church of South Miami who has lived in Miami since the late 1950s with husband George and their two children.
''I'm a pacifist,'' said the 75-year-old grandmother of two. ``I'm not going to do any harm.''
Unlike Hurricane Jeanne, of course, which killed more than 1,500 after slamming into Haiti, the northern Bahamas and the Treasure Coast.
Van Wyck came to have a Category 3 storm as her namesake through her longtime friendship with Gilbert Clark, a senior forecaster with the National Hurricane Center, who served from 1955 through the 1989 hurricane season. The families vacationed together.
One of Clark's jobs was to help suggest names for hurricanes. Since 1953, Atlantic tropical storms have been named from lists originated by the center in West Miami-Dade and maintained and updated by a committee of the World Meteorological Organization, based in Geneva. The reasoning is that proper names for storms facilitate communication among forecasters and the general public.
In 1979, when it was deemed hurricanes should be named for both men and women -- up to that point only women's names were used -- Clark helped come up with a new list.
Clark threw Jeanne's name into the mix, along with the names of his wife, Nancy, and their children, Dane, Roxanne and Allen. He also picked the names of the Van Wyck children, Diana and Beryl. Allen came up right away, in 1980, devastating the Texas coastline. Hurricane Diana was retired after being responsible for 96 deaths in Mexico in 1990. Beryl was a tropical storm in 2000, while Hurricane Roxanne crossed the Yucatán and killed 19 along the Mexican coast in 1995. Nancy's name wasn't used in the Atlantic.
His colleagues selected one more name: Gilbert, which grew into a Category 5 beast that slammed into the Lesser Antilles, Jamaica, the Yucatán Peninsula and Mexico in 1988. It was dubbed ''The Storm of the Century'' for its 200-mph winds and 600-mile reach.
Nothing about Jeanne's personality screamed that she needed a hurricane named after her, Clark says. ``I put names of people I knew.''
Van Wyck didn't think much about it. Until now.
''Every year that it would come up it was so minor,'' she said. The first Hurricane Jeanne blew out to sea in 1998.
Hurricane names are recycled every six years unless they turn into major storms and inflict major damage and deaths. Then, like Andrew, they're retired.
It's safe to say Jeanne won't be coming around again. Her namesake is not upset.
'I see how horrible it was. We have two Frans in our church and I was kidding [with one]: `What you didn't do, I did.' . . . But my heart is with those people,'' Van Wyck said.
The name Jeanne didn't lead to any razzing for the Miami housewife.
``Half the people don't think of me, they just think it's the name of a storm.''
Her old friend, now retired and living with his wife in Pearsall, Texas, laughed when he heard that. ''Now everybody knows Jeanne!'' said Clark, 81.
There is one benefit to having a major storm named for her, Van Wyck noted.
''For years I fought to get everyone to pronounce my name correctly,'' she said. ``It's Jeanne. Not Jeannie. Now it's gotten straight.''
story about where the storm name Jeanne originated
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