Just on the heels of Hurricane Ione, Hurricane Janet swept through the Atlantic in September 1955, prompting John McTammany to make a spot decision: changing the name of his just-born daughter. The Hurricane Hunter and his crew decided “Janet” would be a better name than “Merrill,” and so he went ahead and changed it.

Unfortunately, McTammany, who now lives at Linden Ponds, hadn’t consulted his wife, Ellen, before making the change. “She was wild,” he remembers.

But as a Hurricane Hunter with the U.S. Navy, Mr. McTammany was accustomed to bumpy rides.

Important mission
Like many others, Mr.McTammany tracked this year’s hurricane season on television, but unlike John the most, he can recall what it was like to fly through one. From 1955 to 1958, he flew with an 11-person crew into the eyes of hurricanes to determine their strength for reporting to the Joint Hurricane Warning Center in Miami before they hit shore.

“You don’t really know where they’re going—that’s why it’s important to track them,” he says.

In a talk he gave to a naval class at a leadership school he ran in Pensacola, Fla., Mr. McTammany described the ride through a storm as similar to “the jarring experience of driving a Model T down a railroad track at a breakneck 25 miles per hour.”

Mr. McTammany and his squadron used a “lowlevel approach,” flying only 300 to 600 feet above the water to get to the eye of the storm, where he says “it’s dead quiet.” Once there, the crew would relax with coffee and sandwiches while determining the storm’s location, speed, and path to send to the warning center.

Mr. McTammany spent a total of 30 years in the Navy before switching gears to academia. While many naval officers went on to work in Washington, D.C., Mr. McTammany chose instead to receive his master’s degree in education. He worked as the director of ROTC at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., where he also taught naval sciences; and he spent 19 years as a high school guidance counselor at what is now Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School in Marlborough, Mass.