Cecil E. "Chuck" Leith was a renowned physicist, mathematician, and climate modeler, born in 1923 in Boston, Massachusetts. He spent his early life in Massachusetts, attending high school in Scituate, a town south of Boston. Leith's career took a significant turn during World War II when he was drafted into the Army at the age of twenty-one. Despite his young age, he was involved in a highly classified project, the details of which he was not allowed to disclose.