[ back ]
Rain or shine, ‘Have a happy’
(by Ed Flynn - August 20, 2008)
I see that the Weather Channel – which I wouldn’t have given you a plugged nickel for when it made its first appearance on cable in 1982 – has just been sold to NBC for $3.5 billion. Shows you what I know. But then I’m a guy who would have refused to buy stock in Google if I’d been offered a chance because it has a funny name.
Frankly, I’m beginning to think that as a nation we’re carrying our fascination with the weather a bit too far. OK, don’t get me wrong. I’m not against accurate weather forecasting and warnings of impending hurricanes or tornadoes and floods and other weather related events that threaten property and human life. However, it seems to me that in their effort to make the weather report more entertaining on the local nightly news they spend so much time talking that when they finish I have no idea whether it’s going to rain or not.
“So what’s with this crazy weather, Bob?” the personable anchorman or woman will ask, and Bob or Steve or Katie will say, “Don’t shoot me, I’m only the messenger” and then spend the next two minutes in front of a radar screen showing a low off the coast of Maine, a high that is stalled over Lake Erie and a stubborn jet stream that is dipping across Ohio. All the while they’ll be saying things like “the disturbance from this low may rotate and send impulses along this front, which means we may see an occasional shower but there’s also a chance of some sunshine.” Finally they’ll end their performance by showing us a series of little drawings of clouds with the sun peeking from above and rain drops falling from below.
“What did he say?” my wife will ask.
“I think he said it will rain unless it doesn’t.”
In the old days before television, the only weather forecast we got was in what was called the “Ears” on the front page of the local newspaper, those little boxes on each side of the paper’s name – one of them with the price, generally 5 cents, and the other with the weather report reading “Cloudy with some rain today, clearing tomorrow.” They didn’t tell you much more on the radio. They just read the forecast. But at least you knew what it was even if it wasn’t right.
All that changed with television and the need to make a visual production out of everything. An indication of what was to come was provided in 1941 when WNBT, the forerunner of WNBC in New York City, aired the first televised weather report. There were fewer than 6,000 television sets nationwide at that time so obviously there weren’t many viewers to greet the first NBC weather forecaster; an animated cartoon character named Wolly Lamb. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year, television, along with many other things, was pretty much placed on hold, but at the end of World War II television sales soared and a bevy of puppets and clowns and seductive women in low-cut gowns, none of whom had any meteorological background, tried to come up with the cutest way to present the evening weather forecast.
The first “weather girl” in was Carol Reed who debuted on New York’s WCBS in the early 1950s. If you’re as old as I am you probably remember her, a pretty, perky woman with a smile like a toothpaste commercial who would basically read the official forecast from the Weather Bureau and then, even if that forecast was for violent storms, she’d always end by telling us to “Have a happy.”
Then there was Tex Antoine on WABC who used a magic marker he called “Uncle Weatherbee” to draw cartoon-like figures representing highs and lows on an easel while he narrated the forecast. Antoine’s career ended abruptly when he made a tasteless joke about rape during one of those unscripted chitchats the members of the news team have with the weatherman.
Willard Scott, who still appears occasionally on The Today Show, had a career as Bozo the Clown and as the original Ronald McDonald before becoming a weatherman, and Al Roker, one of televisions most personable personalities, originally aspired to be a cartoonist and, while he is a member of the American Meteorological Society, he studied graphic arts and journalism in college.
Today most of the weather people on local TV stations are trained meteorologist but, while that may serve to make their forecast sound more scientific, I’m not sure it makes them any more accurate than the ones that were delivered by Bozo the Clown or Uncle Weatherbee.
Oh, and by the way, even if an occluded front is currently holding a low-pressure system over your head, “Have a happy.”
[ back ]
