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Eric Sloane Week: ThursdayEric Sloane took a hiatus from writing books about the sky and weather and painting cloudscapes after a friend’s son, Naval pilot Lt. Joseph Prentice Willetts, was killed in a weather-related aviation accident in 1942. Understandably, the accident deeply affected Joseph’s parents, who reached out to Eric Sloane in hopes that he could both memorialise their son and better educate pilots as to the dangers of flying in poor weather. The result was the Willetts Memorial, several dynamic working models of weather phenomena built by Sloane. The models were so realistic and informative that they were installed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.Eric Sloane explaining the anatomy of a cold front with one of his displays in the Willetts Memorial Hall of Atmosphere in New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. This themed week was proposed and written by Wil Mauch (Member 60,370).