Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Chip Clark. There's Charles w Wayne Action Bryant, and there's Jerry the Weather rolland and put the three of us together, you've got yourself the weather team of Stuff you should Know.
That's right. This is a kind of a fun one that Dave Ruse helped us out with. Yeah, you commissioned did a great job. Weather people, that's right, weathercasters, broadcast meteorologists. We're talking about not just meteorologists in general. That's a this is a very specific subset of meteorologists. They're meteorologists who are on TV presenting the weather TV weather people. Yeah, this is Ken Cook.
Oh I forgot about Ken Cook.
Oh my gosh, dude, he's still around.
Really.
Yeah, And that's kind of the fun thing that you will see partially in this episode. And if you just are from a city that has local news, which is to say everywhere, right, if you if you get a gig like this and you want to and you don't do anything wrong, sure like the idea from the weather, from the from the TV station is that they will have you for thirty years if you will stay on,
because that's what they're after. They're after a someone that the local audience bonds with, they trust, they know and love you. Just these jobs don't go away unless you're just not any good at it for some reason. But if you lock in, like if you're like a Dallas Rains or a Ken Cook and you lock into your job as the local weather personality, you're set for life as long as you don't screw it up.
Yeah, which, interestingly, like a little corollary to that, Chuck, is that that that low turnover makes the jobs really compare. Oh sure, I read that TV weather people are not friends with the other channels weather people really. Yeah, it's super competitive from what I heard, which is strange because when you think of the TV weather person they're like the friendliest, nicest person in the whole group.
Yeah, it's like the gang fight and Anchorman in the Alley.
Yeah, and as we'll see, Anchorman, as hilarious as it was, was also incredibly accurate.
Yeah. Absolutely, So we're talking.
About weathercasters, broadcast meteorologists, TV weather personalities. I'm going to give those examples every time. No, And there's a really long standing joke that says, what other profession could you be wrong half of the time and still get paid a million dollars?
Yeah?
Yeah, put around a very, very long time. And it kind of underscores just how people typically think of the weather person. They remember when the weather person gets it wrong a lot of times, but whether people are Do you remember we talked about how incredibly stressful a court stenographer's job must be. I think the weather person on TV might have a job that's equally stressful to that. You think, let's talk about the components of the weather person's job, Chuck.
I think it looks like a good gig. And in fact I wanted for a very brief time. And I've mentioned this before aspired not aspired, that's overshooting it. Thought briefly in college about trying to be a weather person. I don't because I was into meteorology. As I mentioned before, I used to watch the Weather Channel with my best friend Rat in high school. Yeah, while we hung out, and I took a weather and climate course in college, and that further reinforced that. I was like, this is
really cool. And I was a pre journalism major I was in. I wanted to be I thought I wanted to be like a broadcast news kind of reporter type. But I thought no one, And this was, you know, eight nineteen year old Tack. I was like, nobody's trying to be a weather person these days because it's so uncool, like that would probably be a pretty easy gig to get. Yeah, not to little dude.
And there's so much work to it too. So first of all, not everyone's a meteorologist. And this is a big boat of contention among the meteorologists who do present on TV.
Yeah, most of them are now, but not all of them.
Yes, but from what I saw, by most, that means slightly over fifty percent. Oh really, Yeah, it's not like the vast majority from what I've seen, I.
Guess I'm thinking most major cities. But yeah, you're right, I guess sure. Sheboygan doesn't have a meteorologist.
I think if you are an actual meteorologist on TV, you command more money and probably a little more respect, who knows, of course, But while you're while you're working. So, say you are a meteorologist, okay, so you have to have an understanding of how the weather works. You have to understand how you can communicate that understanding to the public. In an understandable way, So understanding all around you have to have. It's a good personnel, Like you can't be
like me some dark smow. You know, you have to be nice and people people want to like you, and so you got to be likable in return. You also have to have like a lot of poise because you're up there on live TV. Don't forget, all of this is live And one of the things I didn't know about weather people they don't have a script. And if you ever watch a weather person deliver their spiel in a couple of minutes, most of the time they do not mess up. They don't have to correct themselves. They
don't like like accidentally say half of a word. They're like, they're like the opposite of us.
Right.
They do not screw up, and sometimes they do, of course, but most of the time it right. So the fact that they're they know what they're talking about. They're getting it across in a logical manner that's spread out in like some understandable way that you can follow that makes sense on live TV, while manipulating images on a green screen that they can't see except for monitors on either side, while also just being fun and chipper and doing it
all within your time limit. That's I say that that is a high stress, really admirable job.
Okay, here's what I say. That's your take. My take. Admirable for sure, high stress for week one, and then I think you're on cruise control. Okay, next thirty five years.
Maybe not week one, but I see what you mean.
Sure, And I'm not saying again, not saying that they're not doing a good job or whatever. But I bet you once they had that down, it's it's a pretty great job. Sure, that's not super stressful. All right, that's just my guess. Yeah, I no, you won me over to your side. I'm usually my opinion is almost always correct, but it was. Let's go back in time, though, to eighteen seventy went a very sort of mind the mental
thing happened in the United States weatherwise. It's when the National Weather Service was founded, and they from the get go said, here's our mission. We're going to collect data from all over the country from these weather stations. We're going to send it out on the telegraph and people can put it in newspapers if they want. And that's just what happened. Starting in the eighteen eighties with New York World, they started putting their own local weather forecast
on the front page. And then it took another cheese probably fifty years or so, maybe not quite before a paper would do the national weather and that would of course be the New York Times did a national weather map.
Yeah, and so weather's always basically been associated with news, like right from the get go. And as news has evolved in the way that news is delivered, the weather's evolved alongside it. So when the news made the jump to radio, weather was right there basically from the outside. And there was a guy named Jimmy Fiddler and he was out of WLBC and Munchie Indiana and uh.
Munchie Monsey's Munsy.
If it were Italian, it'd be Munchie.
Oh, I love Munchie. We should go.
Okay, it is Monsy. I know that because it's not that far from Toledo. So thank you for corre.
Apologize about my asthma throat too. If people think I'm dying, I'm not. It's just a pollen season, dude.
It is so bad up here, it's crazy.
Yeah, it's really bad.
Yeah, three thousands we're talking about people, Is that the level is high.
Yes, yeah, because usually I don't get it too bad. But I've been wheezy and asthmatic for like six weeks plus.
There's also the nice little bonus of it being cold, super cold, like it's February cold here right now, and it's not like it was cold on one day. It's set in cold. I don't know what's going on.
Yeah, uh. And I should also point out that laughing uh triggers like that asthma, wheeze and cough.
Well, I'll try to be funny. I'm not making any promise.
I know. I'm trying to contain my laugh because if not, I'll.
Go I would find that satisfying.
All right, try and kill me, Okay.
So anyway, he was out of WLBC in Muncie, Indiana, and he's known as basically the first weatherman, the guy who created the what we saw as the weatherman and eventually weather person all the way back in the nineteen thirties.
Yeah, and that's sort of the more personality driven weather reporter. Yeah. As we'll see you know, well we can talk about it right now. Actually, as we'll see if TV, as TV became a thing that sort of came and went over the years until it firmly established itself as like whether people should be probably just a little more personality plus. But he was also the first human to be on
the television reporting the weather. TV in the late nineteen thirties and early forties was not a very big deal, only about and it's hard to find good numbers, but they found a stat that said about six thousand TV sets nationwide man after the war, that became in less than a decade close to ten million TV sets. So crazy,
that's when that boom happened. But he old Jimmie phil almost At Fielder Fiddler went on TV in Cincinnata either in nineteen thirty nine or nineteen forty as the first human TV weatherman.
Yes, and I'm glad that you Caveat did that with human because a lot of people were like, oh no, the first weather person of all time was Wooly Lamb, a cartoon character a Lamb. He didn't catch that from the name. Who was just a total shill for Botany wrinkle proof ties. Botany, I take it is the same as the Botany five hundred company that outfitted guys like Rod Serling and all of them in the.
Fifties oh, nice looking suits.
So Wooly had a goal that was that preceded every forecast. And I have not heard this, but I guarantee, just from reading it, I can recreate it.
You ready, that's it.
It's hot, it's cold, it's rain, it's fair. Way, I already screwed it up. Hold on, let me try again one and it too. It's hot, it's cold, it's rain, it's fair. It's all mixed up together. But eyes Botany's Wooly lamp predict tomorrow's weather.
I think that you nailed it.
That's the only way you could thank you.
Or what was the star search? Four and three quarter stars?
Yeah, that's right. I forgot about that.
Wooly lamb though was a full year or more after uh, Fiddler, So I don't see why the date is under dispute. So I don't care. That's probably just the internet thing.
Yeah, I don't know if Fiddler was considered a big liar or something because they date says that there's no archival footage of it. But if he said that, he did.
Well just because they didn't cord that stuff back then.
Right exactly? Remember in our sitcoms episode, they didn't start recording until the late forties early fifties. Maybe it was just live, not even live to tape, right, But the fact that he's saying he did it, I don't see why they would be like, no, you're lying. It was really Wooly Lamb.
Yeah, it was in his obituary, so I'll go with that.
But there was one other thing that Jimmy Fiddler did that created the persona of the TV weather man in addition to that whole you know that the personality that you were talking about. He took weather data from all different sorts of places and put it together and interpreted it in a way that he could then present it to the public who would then know what the weather was going to be like tomorrow or the day after. That was Jimmy Fiddler who created that.
That's right, and that set the standard.
It did, and Wooly Lamb kind of set a weird standard too in the post war years, right.
Uh, I don't know about this what happened.
Oh well, so Wooly Lamb. So imagine a cartoon Lamb as your weather person on your local TV station.
I've got I'm there.
Kind of weird. There was a period in the late forties early fifties where that would kind of be a fairly normal thing. Or in addition to cartoon lambs, there were puppits.
Yeah, yeah, I get what you mean.
There were other cartoons. There were there were all clowns, all sorts of just weird stuff, rhyming guys like we'll talk about a little bit of that. But Wooly Lamb and Jimmy Fidler really set the stage for whether people would come. And I think, Chuck, I have just set the stage for our first at break well done.
All right, So I mentioned before TV's booming post war, close to ten million TV sets in the end of the nineteen forties. By that time, they had about seventy local TV stations, which you know, doesn't sound like a lot compared to today, but obviously you know your major cities are going to have them, and it took a long time. And we'll talk about when the FCC broke things up and allowed more than one per city as well.
So a little bit. But in the forties, this is where I was talking about sort of personality plus kind of coming and going. There were a couple kinds of weather forecasters on television when it first started really rolling out postwar, and that was the really sort of dry kind. Some of these people were former there were veterans from the military who knew about the weather from you know, do that in the military. Sometimes they were just really
stuffy science types. Sometimes they were not science people at all, and they were just stuffy, but they were just kind of boring. But if you you know, like I said at the beginning, you could lock into a job even back then, right and have it through the nineteen sixties and into the seventies. And that happened in a few occasions, right. Yeah.
There was a guy the chief meteorologist at WTP in Washington, D C. Lewis Allen, and he was there for many decades. I'm not sure when he retired, but he was around for a very long time. There's people still alive that remember him as their weather man, right, yeah, And he was really well known. He was an incredibly accomplished meteorologist. But he was also a pretty good little drawer, and so he would draw in like what the next day's weather was going to be like he called it a woodle,
a weather doodle. And I've seen from the research, if you have a little thing like that or a good sign off for something. Yeah, oh yeah, I mean talk about endearing the public to you, that's all. It takes a woodle.
Yeah, go screw yourself, San Diego. Yeah. Clint Yule was another one. He became known nationally as mister Weather because he became the first national deliver of weather in the late nineteen forties when he debuted on the Camel News
Caravan on NBC. Camel Cigarettes of course sponsored that, and he worked out of Chicago, but kind of invented a system that would become the green screen later by putting a map, a Rand McNally map of the United States, under plexiglass and then drawing on it with a race marker, and he would you know, draw you know, like weather fronts and rain and dry weather and stuff like that. He would draw words on it. Then it moved to color.
He made those color markers and he was the first sort of national do to come around.
One little tidbit about Clint Yule, that Ram McNally map. He had to bring it from homes.
Yeah, it was his.
It's hilarious.
They didn't cover it. I mentioned the two types of weather people. This was sort of into the nineteen fifties, so I guess it was three types. You had your sort of dry types, but in the fifties they really wanted to spice it up, and that's when you got either your wacky men, like you mentioned the rhyming weatherman that was out of Billiams out of Nashville, or people
that had puppets. Willard Scott was very famous weatherman his entire career, but had always been pretty wacky, and was Bozo the Clown on TV before that, and was Ronald McDonald and TV commercials before that, I think the first Ronald McDonald. Yeah, but you had those wacky types, these weird men trying to inject a little entertainment into the news weather. And then you had what were known men as weather girls, which was hey, let's get in a track a young woman. Let's put her in a nice,
fashionable outfit. Who cares if she knows meteorology, Let's just put her on her TV screen.
Yeah, And the first weather girl was Carol Reid at WCBS in New York and they brought her on to go head to head with the weatherman tex Antoine at WNBC. And the reason why was because it's like you said, the FCC opened up competition in nineteen fifty two for TV licenses, So that's where we got more than one local TV station. Yeah, so all of a sudden there was that competition, and they figured out, well, people don't really take the weather all that seriously. It's not like
crime or something like that. Let's use that to kind of gain viewers by just being a little wacky. So tex Antoine he had a cartoon named Uncle Webby and he would blame Uncle Webby the Weather Bureau if he got it wrong, it was Uncle Webby's fault and it was kind of like a gruff sidechick. And he was extraordinarily popular. So they brought Kyl Reid on as an attractive twenty six year old who didn't have any training
in meteorology, right, but she was very likable. She had a good smile and she had a good sign off.
Chuck, I'm going to give it to you. You can't you can't not take this. Have a happy, have a happy, that's very nice.
Yeah, so she kicked off the whole weather girls thing.
Oh yeah, there was another one named Ginger Stanley. She would sometimes get in her bathing suit and get in a tank of water on the CBS Morning Show to deliver the weather. Yeah. Another one, and this is hard to believe. They had in lingerie in bed Yeah, in nineteen fifty two, I know, which imagine the lingerie then was just some head to toe Yeah, I had to toe, you know, gown that just looks sort of silky to the touch would be my guest.
Sure.
And then you had the fact that it was a legit entree point though if you wanted to do serious news, so you would just get in. However you could, like Diane Sawyer was one of these quote unquote weather girls in Louisville, and they said take those glasses off, hin, Yeah.
And then seldom make passes at girls who are glasses.
You looked too smart. And Roquel Welch was in fact in San Diego and she was the sun up weather girl.
Fact to the podcast, Roquel Welch at the time was known as Raquel.
Tahata Yeah, which means lime tree. Oh does it? Yeah, Roquel lime tree.
That's also Raquel means squeeze.
And Welch means grape juice.
Wow. I'm all I'm starting to see the pattern now.
I think in the nineteen sixty one was sort of the apex of the weather girl phenomenon, when they had four hundred and sixty six TV stations nationwide in about three quarters of them were using weather girls. And that's, you know, generally not the case anymore. When you see a woman that is the local meteorologist, and at least in a big city, chances are she has her meteorology degree, yes, and a certified as well.
It's definitely not a novelty or like they're using sex appeal to get people to watch the weather. That's not what they're ostensibly doing any longer. But what I found interesting was that Tarol Reid, who started the weather girl era, also ended it when she was let go in nineteen sixty four. I believe that's considered the end of the
weather girl era too. And the reason that the weather girl era came to an end is because the pendulum, which had started with stuffy academics and then swung to women in lingerie in bed giving the weather, yeah, we started to swing back the other way where the actual like legitimate meteorologists are like, hey, what we're doing is actually kind of important and it's not as easy as
you guys think. So we want a little more respect, and so to help kind of give them back, the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association started coming up with certifications and seal of approval, seals of approval that I, like a legit meteorologist on TV who was doing good work, could get and basically use as like a bona fide.
Yeah, like why did I go to college and study this and work on training my hair part for the past fifteen years? Yeah, and put all this money into hair spray If I can't get on TV because there's a lady in our lingerie in bed.
You know, I'm in the process of training my hair part. My hairdresser, Michael something, get it over. Yeah, he thought it was over way too close to my ears, So he's moving a little closer towards the crown of my head. Very interesting, It is interesting, and it's actually kind of a rough transition period because my hair wants to go back down, but I've got to go back up this way, and it doesn't always want to do that. I constantly run my stuff my fingers, so my stupid hair it's awful.
And they by doing that because it's been cold lately, it creates a lot of static, so it just ends up like stuck to my foreheaded one large mass, and I end up with a helmet head ironically looking like a nineteen seventies weather person.
I my hair, I've been getting it cut on the sides and in the back, and I just I've been doing all kinds of crazy hair stuff since the pandemic. But what I realized is, I think what I'm subconsciously going for is the haircut I had in high school was when I had like the long, all one link, the bangs skater cut and kind of shaved up on the sides and in the back. I'm getting there, can't
quite envision that. I'll send you a picture of well, I'll say you with bags for real, well not bangs, like combed straight down on my forehead.
So now like Anthony Keatus's current haircut, time.
Of thing, no no no no, no, no no, I'm swooping it up and over like always. But it's just sort of that all one linked sort of thing.
I'm still having trouble.
I'll see you on tour soon, okay, and we can talk about each other's hair in the green room.
Okay, So let's move on beyond our hair, right, because we're coming to another pivotal watershed moment in TV weather people history.
Yeah, we're coming to the Anchorman years. This was, like you said, that movie was true in a lot of ways. And in the nineteen sixties, sort of the late sixties, WABC in New York said, all right, you know, the news had always been sort of a serious affair, like when you think of national news, you think of like the Walter Cronkites and stuff like that. Was it wasn't like the news as we know it today even locally.
And WABC in New York said, you know what, let's let's transform our newscast and have a little more fun with it. It was called happy Talker, Happy News, and we'll this news team will have two very personable anchors, Like everyone's got to be personality. Plus, now everyone's got to kind of joke around as you go to commercial or maybe the weather man even or the sportsperson interjects from you know, the side when they're talking a news story.
Obviously not you know, if it's like a really serious story, they don't come in and joke. But if it's the cat stuck in the tree and the little old lady who scaled it to get it down. Everybody in the newsroom is now this one big fun group, laughing and joking about it.
Right, And the goal is to make the viewer think that they're watching like a group of friends who hang out like off hours and stuff like that too, right, yeah, like Anchorman, exactly right, Like that was the thing. Like in Anchorman, they actually did that, and they were I didn't realize it, but they were parodying happy talk, happy news.
And there was a news manager specifically named al Primo who's brought into WABC to get ratings up, who's credit was coming up with that format, and within a decade, every single TV station still today has the happy talk format. So the weather person factors into this, because Chuck, they had to have their own personality, and they went back to basically Jimmy Fiddler's personality and adopted that permanently as
this happy, peppy, science y type. In fact, a lot of whether people, especially like local stations and smaller markets, are called upon to basically explain science stuff sometimes like they're just the in house egghead basically, right.
Yeah, and the only person on staff of the science degree probably.
Right, so there was one thing that really kind of also happened from the happy talk format aside from it just existing. Tex Antoine, who I mentioned, he was brought on to WNBC in the fifties and gave everybody else a run for their money. He got canceled long before anybody ever even thought of the word canceled. But he as part of his happy talk spiel, he would often like make funny comments on news stories, and I think it became so ingrained in his his pattern that he
didn't always stop and think what he was saying. And this is definitely a case of that.
Yeah, so he got he got he got fired kind of immediately, I think.
Yeah, from what I saw for sure, And there were a lot of people stepped up to try to bring him back or whatever they were like. No, Don was definitely over the line.
All right, should we take a break, Yes, all right, let's take a break and we will talk about uh, well, let's talk more about weather people right after this.
Stop stop stop stop stop, Okay, Chuck. So, one thing that we've kind of been tracking here is this kind of evolutionless progression of delivering the weather on TV. And one of the big technological advances was the launch of the Goes one geostationary satellite over the US back in nineteen seventy five. Because now we had serious av that
the weather people didn't have before. You could string together these pictures taken every half hour of cloud formations and basically do like a flip book on TV and show people the clouds moving across the United States. And if you watch today, that the cloud movement that just keeps resetting over and over again, you know during the this like one specific part of the weather task. Yeah, that's the exact same thing. It's probably not coming from Goes
one anymore. It might be, but it's definitely in that the legacy of the Goes one satellite.
Oh yeah. And if you're watching the news in the mid seventies and all of a sudden you see a front literally moving for the first time, like you're pretty knocked out, it was a big deal. People really loved it. The green screen comes along in the eighties. That's what you mentioned earlier. When you are standing in front of a green screen, and maybe we should do like a short stuff on chroma key technology.
All right, we should do it in front of a green screen.
We should we've done stuff in front of green screens before. Yeah, lots sure, but yeah, they're standing there, they're looking off screen at monitors, they're pointing, you know, you know, it takes a little time to learn how to master pointing at a blank screen and lining it up correctly so you're pointing at you know, Kansas City and not ames
Iowa by accident. Doppler comes along as sort of the next big thing or next rad next generation radar that was in the early nineties and another big game changer as far as you know, just more in depth and detailed weather forecasting and also how to like you know, broadcast it for people's eyeballs.
Right, yeah, because you could see into the storm. Now you could talk about the precipitation like inside the storm. It was really I mean, next generation.
Next gen athlete titled. So then we get to the big question which a lot of people may wonder, is like do these people, I know they have meteorology degrees, but a lot of times do But do they come up with their own forecasts or do they just get a print out of the national weather forecast and read it on the air and move their hands around a screen and it's a little bit of both. Sure, they get all of their weather basically data wise from the
National Weather Service and from the NOAA. Why not, that's where it all lives. That's where you're going to get the most accurate stuff. They're not going to be stubborn and be like, well I don't want to use this stuff. They all use it. But they are like generally people that have lived in this place for a while or you know, after the gain experience, they also gain weather experience.
And you might hear a local person say like, you know, this front is coming through, but you know, as we've seen before in Atlanta, like in you know, eight years ago when we had this happen, when we thought that was going to happen. Like their experience in their their sort of color commentary is their own, and it very much comes into play and is relevant.
My understanding too, is that they're taking this data from the Weather Service and NOAH that they provide and having to interpret it themselves, analyze it, interpret it, and then and then I guess broadcasted in an understandable way. Right, So it's not like the Weather Service or no It just sends out like, hey you can here's here's format a if you want to be spicy today, here's when that's a little edgy. Is nothing like that.
It's not written for broadcast now, right.
So even if you don't have a meteorological degree, you have to understand how to read and interpret that kind of data. And I don't think it's so arcane that like no like the sigma characters used repeatedly or anything like that. I think you can make heads or tails of it because it's free and open to the public. Right, it's available to everybody. But there's no purpose in not
using that information. That's what everybody does. It's what they've been doing since eighteen seventy and it's one of those if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Yeah, And at the same time, there's a lot of work that they have to put into putting this the puzzle pieces together and giving a clear picture.
Absolutely, if you're doing the morning news, you are showing up to work at like three point thirty four in the morning, depending on what time your first broadcast is. Yeah, some of those first local news broadcasts are you know, four thirty five AM. And they got to be there and know what's going on and look fresh and be ready to go get those morning eyebags.
Calm down right the speaking of that, chuck, They a lot of most of them do their own hair and makeup, unless you're in a really big city.
Oh really, Yeah, was there a poll?
No, Actually, I've read I should probably shout it out. I read a post from tropicalweather dot net. Could not, for the life of me find out who wrote that. But they were clearly like a former TV weather caster, and they talked about, you know, day in the life of a weather caster. And one of those things was like they're like a one person show, Like they do almost all their own stuff unless they're in a really large market. Yeah.
I mean, if you're in a small market, you don't have a weather team of like five or six people put all this stuff together for you. You're like, you know how to work the software, the graphics software, You're like you said you are, You're you're doing it on your own. Basically, if you're in a bigger city, then you're gonna have like your weather team and stuff like that, and especially if you get to the tippy top of like a Dallas Rains. I mentioned him a couple of times.
He's the La Gui forever he may still be for all I.
Know, what about storm fields.
Yeah, Like, if you're sort of a weather celebrity and a big market, then I'm sure that you've got hair and makeup and you've got people putting together all your stuff for you generally, right. But you know, otherwise you're kind of in the trenches doing the hard work. You you, you know, you probably don't go on to the field as much if you're in a big city, but if you're the small market person, you're probably still the one that's standing out in the rain at times during a big storm.
Yeah. One of the other things, too, is when you're when you get this picture of the weather together, it's like four in the morning, you have to brief the news manager on whether any of the weather warrant any news coverage, which I hadn't thought about, but that's totally true. I mean, sometimes the weather makes the news, and that's from coordinating with the news manager and the weather caster.
You mean, like additional like it's a news story, yes, yeah, yeah.
And then so in addition to just all of the weather stuff, there's a lot of things that weathercasters cover that we don't that don't really have anything to do with the weather, but we still expect the weather caster to give it to us celestial events, pollen counts, fishing forecasts of course, all sorts of that stuff. Like if you think about it, not really part of the weather.
And in fact, that tropicalweather dot net really dryly put it that the public relates astrological events to weather, considering that it is viewed in the sky.
Yeah, it is. It.
It's kind of true. We all kind of think of that as weather, but really not a lot to do with weather. But the weather people have to look that up to They have to research local events to put the weather in context, like is the big May Day parade gonna get rained out?
Of course, like that kind of thing.
So it digs the weather, makes it personal and important to you by saying, like this thing you're going to may or may not get rained out, and the weather person has to know all of that stuff.
Yeah. Absolutely. When they're not in the studio and doing weather stuff, they're usually pretty active in the community. You're not going to find like a local TV weather person that's just like a shut in off hours and doesn't get involved. I think they're very much expected and it's good for their brand obviously, to get out in the community, to be the guest judge at the Chicken Wing Flaning, which, by the way, I'm doing coming up soon. Oh really
in Atlanta. I'm a celebrity judge for the Kirkwood Wing Flaning Wow in May.
Best of luck.
So if anyone wants to come down there and heckle me, feel free visit a elementary schools and go talk about weather stuff there. And like I said, you're your own brand, so it will behoove you to to build your brand, and you do that through social media. So yeah, chances are you got a big or hopefully a big Instagram following, or you're on Twitter or whatever, like you know, just like any other on air personality, you want your name to be out there.
Okay, So you got up and got to work at three point thirty. You took all of the tea leaves from the NASA Weather Service and Noah put them together into a picture that you can share with people. You've made literal pictures of this stuff as graphics. You probably in between the morning news and say the new News if you're doing both of those, you taped a broadcast for the website. You had to tweet the whole time
to try to build your social media following. And then after work you had to go into an elementary school and give a talk about weather and then go home, eat, go to bit and then get up the next morning at I don't know, two forty five or three. That's the life of a weather person.
No, you go to the local fern bar.
Okay, yeah that's true. That's probably you could fit that in there somewhere. You could fit a Harvey wallbanger at too, and.
Yeah that's what you do in the seventies. But yeah, it's a it's a tough job. I mean, you lost me at two forty five in the morning.
No doubt. And then also there's I mean, unless you're at the top of the heap, they're gonna tell you need to work on the fourth July, on Christmas, on Thanksgiving, like and I saw one of the ways again to from tropical weather dot net. If you want to get your foot in the door, basically say I will be the guy that works on Christmas and Thanksgiving and just give me on TV. Let me show everybody what I've got. I got five thousand followers on Twitter, give me a shot.
Give me afraid, not afraid to stand in front of a tornado.
Right, that's another one too. I mean standing in storms is, like you said, it's a real hazard of the job, but they kind of, depending on who you are, you kind of have to do it.
Yeah, And that's become a more of a thing. And I think in the last like twenty years or so, Like I remember watching the Weather Channel the eighties, and I don't remember seeing a ton of that, but people watch the Weather Channel now to see what's the guy's name, Jim Canty, Yeah, Jim Cantoorre. You know, is this the one where he's going to be swept out to see or not?
Yeah?
The one.
Dave linked to a clip of Hurricane Ian and Jim Cantoreian hanging on to us like a street sign. Yeah, and behind him is like a stop sign that's been bent at the base and it's just flipping back and forth. And if that thing swung, it would chop Jim cantore right in half. Like those things are heavy and they can be sharp at high speeds, So it is definitely dangerous. But you said that it was from the maybe the
nineties or something that they started going out in the weather. Apparently, Dan Rathers credited as one of the first reporters to go out in a hurricane Hurricane Carla eighteen sixty one, when he was just a little cub reporter at KHO You and Houston, and he went out and showed moves like Alan the hurricane and kind of set that trend that I guess. I think you're right. It wasn't something that you would see until later on after the Weather Channel really kind of got into it.
Yeah, I mean I feel like it became a little more like the storm chasy thing kind of cult holle More Weather Channel, Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, Which is funny. I know I said this before, but Emily loves Twister and it is just so not her thing. And my joke that I've used over and over over the years when people talk about Emily's taste of movies is Emily likes two types of movies, small indie dramas and Twister.
Liking Twister is so high.
Oh though it is Ohio now that I think about it, And she was obsessed with tornadoes growing up because of Sohio for sure. But yeah, the Weather Channel came around in eighty two so I had never thought about it. When I was watching it in like eighty eight, it was still pretty new. John Coleman was the was the brainchild behind it. He got to start in the seventies and eventually was the weather person for Good Morning America. And he was one of the ones that was like,
you know, people want to watch people. They don't tune in for the weather. They tune in to watch the weather person, which is just sort of true and sort of not.
Yeah, I guess it depends on the weather person really if you think about it.
But they also want to hear the weather, right, right.
Although you know, I have something to confess. I have trouble paying attention and focusing sometimes. Okay, I don't think in the history of my entire life, I've ever absorbed a weather report ever. Really, I'll watch the whole thing and at the end I'll be like, I have no idea what the weather's going to be tomorrow. Every single time.
I haven't watched a weather report in a long time.
I watch local and national news almost every night, so it happens almost every day.
That's yeah, I haven't watched local news since in probably twenty something years.
Oh, you're missing out, buddy.
I'm not into it TV before eight pm. Well except for Jeopardy.
Okay that's seven thirty so yeah, still.
But then it goes back off at eight so usually until nine.
Does it?
Really?
There's that hour of power where you're just sitting there meditating.
No, that's when uh, that's when bedtime for Ruby happens. So you can't screen on KIT. She'll just be like, must watch, right, I don't care.
I want to watch how the Equalizer ends tonight.
Oh dude, she'll watch. She was watching the stupid ads on the gas pump the other day from the car.
Oh my god.
I was like, this is sick.
Yeah, that's a problem, Chuck. You got a problem on your hands there.
And she said, screw you, dad.
So well there's your other problem too. That and Emily loving Twister. You got a lot of problems.
That's right. But you know what's not one the weather? Because I use my weather apps. That's how I ingest the weather. I guess I'm like a gen z because they've done research, Pew research, even the best research, and they found this, forty two percent of people over sixty five still follow the local news very closely and fifty one percent of that group of people get their local
news from local TV broadcasts. Sure, if you go to under thirty, it drops down to fifteen percent follow the local news very closely, and twenty six percent prefer to get their news from TV.
Right, so sixty percent of that group like diet it from online.
Yeah, I mean, I'm I want to see who that fifteen percent of twenty something says is following the local news very closely on television.
I think it's like a retro kind of thing. They also read letters by hand and stuff like that. Maybe that's it, that's my guess. But so you could make a pretty good point that the TV weather caster is like, you know, a walking dinosaur. They're they're doomed, right, Nah.
The thing is, no, you're right. The thing is is if the Pew also did another poll where they asked people like, what's the what's the most important part of a local newscast, and everybody seventy percent of people said the weather.
Yeah, it topped.
Crime. Sports was second to last, just above restaurants, clubs, and bars, which I found really surprising. But because they treat this sports department like they're just gods or something, Yeah, so the weather person. As long as there's local news, there's going to be weather people because they're the bright shining star of the whole thing as far as the viewing public goes, even if they're not particularly portrayed or
treated that way. Although it feels like in recent years like they've started to really kind of spotlight the weather person a little more and how smart they are and reliable and how great their family thinks they are, like the thing.
Yeah, and you know, I bet they had the same fears just about local news period once national news became a thing on TV. Yeah, and it'll always be around because people I just think people like, uh, I like that it's still on. I don't watch it, but I love that. I mean the TV was on in a restaurant I was at the night and that's where I saw Ken Cook was still around. Yeah, like wow, look at him still going.
Yeah.
And Jeff Hellndry used to be the sports guy. I think he's an anchor now.
But that's the thing. I mean, like you can not you know, participate or take part in something and still be bummed if it isn't around anymore, you know. Yeah, So there's another kind of route that some weather casters are taking to wrap all this up, and that is to basically interpret the weather as far as like climate
change goes. Yeah, and Dave put it really perfectly that they're they're evolving into basic a science reporter who doesn't just forecast the weather, but puts it into context, particularly these days, in the context of climate change. Yeah, and that's that's a pretty good new direction for them to go in. It makes a lot of sense. And talk about making yourself relevant.
Yeah, well, I mean, depending on what city you live in, that's probably welcome or not welcome. I did see John Coleman. I was looking trying to find clips of him on YouTube and there was one I couldn't find out what year it was, but one where they he did a full segment poo pooing climate change basically in the data. Oh yeah, yeah, I thought it was pretty interesting, the.
Guy who founded the Weather Channel. Yeah, okay, oh Man, that reminds me. There's a book called Merchants of Doubt I think I've talked about before, and it's like, it's
really unnerving. It's about stuff like that. It's about people who don't I'm not accusing John Coleman to this, but it's about scientists who are basically paid by huge companies to so out among the public about whether the science mind things like climate change or tobacco causing cancer was actually legitimate or not and really set the world back in all sorts of really evil ways. It's really tough to read.
Hmm sounds fun.
Yeah, really that was a weird way to end this episode, but that's how we're gonna end it.
Yeah, I got nothing else, all right.
Well, so Chuck said he's got nothing else. Everybody. That means the time for listener mail.
This is about Dolly Parton. We had a fun recent episode on Dolly her majesty and this is from John Pizeric who lives in Japan. Hey, guys, want to chime in with a fun Dolly Parton fact to just show how she's become incorporated in all sorts of cultures. I've included a picture for reference. But in dental school, when you learn to do fillings, we use a thin metal
band to help shape the fillings for the tooth. However, sometimes a feeling would be particularly deep or large, and stead of using the standard type one band, you would need to use a type two band. To help students remember what the Type two band looks like. They were effectionally known as the Dolly Parton band because of the bust like appearance she became famous for. And he's showing me these little bands in one. One just looks like a sort of a bent popsicle stick, like a boomerang
shaped popsicle stick. And one looks like a boomerang popsicle stick with boobs where the boomerang meets in the center. Yeah. I canly check that out, so that must be what he's talking about. I know Chuck has had his fair share of dental experience, would almost guarantee that most Dennis know the reference. If you were to bring this up, probably I'm going to do that, John, just so you know.
Thank you for all you do. I wish my trip to DC from Japan was able to coincide with your show, but a glass is not the case.
So sorry, John, Yeah, sorry about that.
John.
Well, thanks for a great email though. We appreciate that. We always love learning new weird things, and that was a new weird.
Thing for all right, Chuck, new for me.
If you want to get in touch with this, like John did, send us an email. Send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.