Good evening, and thanks for tuning in. For thirty years I stood in front of a map and told the folks in our corner of the state whether to bring an umbrella. I did the six o'clock and the ten o'clock weather on Channel 6, a small station in a small market, from the spring of 1966 until I hung up the pointer in June of 1996. My grandson set me up with this web page over the summer, and he says I can write as much as I want, which nobody in television ever told me. So here goes.

I won't name the station or the town. The station's still on the air with a fine young fellow doing the weather, and he doesn't need an old man's home page turning up next to his name. If you watched us, you know. If you didn't, it doesn't matter. Every small-market station in the country had somebody like me, and the stories are mostly the same.

Like a lot of television weathermen of my generation, I learned weather in the Air Force. I was a weather observer, which meant I stood outside every hour and wrote down what the sky was doing, and then I went inside and plotted it on a map with a pencil. That was the whole job, and I loved it. I got out in 1962 with a wife, a baby and no plan, and I sold appliances for a while.

In 1966 the fellow who did the weather at Channel 6 left for a bigger station, which is how it always went, and the station manager, who'd bought a refrigerator from me, asked if I wanted to try it. There was no audition to speak of. He put me in front of the map at 6 o'clock on a Tuesday and told me not to say "uh." I said "uh" four times. I counted. They hired me anyway, at $95 a week, and I also read the farm report and did the Saturday morning kids' show for the first two years, in a cowboy hat, which I'd rather not discuss.

Here is what a small-station weather set looked like in 1966. A big map of the United States, painted on a sheet of steel and mounted on the wall, with our state drawn a little bigger than it should've been. A box of magnets: yellow suns, gray clouds, clouds with lines under them for rain, snowflakes, red half-circles and blue triangles for the fronts, and big black "H" and "L" letters for the highs and lows. Next to it, a sheet of clear plexiglass over a map of the state, that I'd draw on with a grease pencil during the day and wipe off with a rag before the ten o'clock.

The forecast itself came from the Weather Bureau (it wasn't called the National Weather Service until 1970). We had a teletype in the newsroom that clattered all day, and the Bureau's forecast for our zone came over it, and the observations from the airports came over it, and I'd take those and make the maps. We also had a facsimile machine, a big drum that turned slowly and burned the surface map onto paper an inch at a time, and by four o'clock you had a map with the fronts on it that was already a few hours old. You put the magnets where the fax said and then you used your own head about what it meant for our county.

The thing people don't remember is that it was all live. No tape. If a magnet fell off the map (and they did, about once a month) you picked it up and put it back and kept talking. One night in 1968 the "L" fell off Kansas during my forecast and rolled under the anchor desk, and I said, "Well, folks, looks like that low is moving faster than we thought," and I got fan mail. That was the first fan mail I ever got. For dropping a magnet.

The forecast was two days. "Tonight, tomorrow, and a look at the day after." That was as far out as anybody honest would go. The five-day forecast didn't come to our station until the early 1980s, and when it did, I'll be honest, the fourth and fifth days were as much art as science.

We got our first weather graphics that weren't magnets around 1972: little cardboard cards with the temperatures for the cities, lettered by hand by the art department, that a cameraman would shoot one at a time while I talked. Then a machine that could put letters on the screen electronically, which felt like science fiction. My temperatures had never been so legible.

For the first nine years I was on the air, we had no radar of our own. If a storm was coming and I wanted to know where it was, I picked up the phone and called the Weather Bureau office at the airport, and a fellow there would look at his scope and tell me. Then I'd go on the air and describe it with my hands. "There's a line of thunderstorms about here, moving this way." I got good at hands.

In 1975 the station bought its own weather radar. A dish went up on the roof, a scope came into the studio, and for the first time I could point a camera at a picture of the rain. It was a black-and-white picture, a sweep going around, and the echoes were blobs of white. You learned to read it: the solid bright ones were the heavy stuff, the fuzzy ones weren't much, and the big round blob right over the station was the water tower, which showed up on every sweep for twenty-one years and which I once forgot to explain to a substitute anchor, who announced a storm parked over downtown.

Then in the early 1980s came color radar. Every station in the country got one about the same time and every station promoted it like they'd invented rain. Ours came with a jingle. Green was light, yellow was moderate, red was heavy, and viewers learned that scale faster than they ever learned the fronts. To this day people will call a station and say "there's red over my house," and there is, and they're right to be worried.

Around the same time we went to the chroma key, which is the blue wall. You stand in front of a blank blue wall, the switcher replaces the blue with the map, and you watch yourself in a monitor off to the side so you know where to point. Every weatherman in America learned not to wear a blue tie the same week, and most of us learned it on the air. The magnets went into a box in the basement. I kept an "H" on my desk for the rest of my career.

By the middle 1980s we had a computer graphics system in the weather office that drew the maps for you: you typed in the temperatures and it put them on the screen, and it could animate the satellite picture, and I had a keyboard on the set that changed the maps when I pushed a button. Compared to magnets it was a miracle, and compared to what they've got now it was a toy. The satellite pictures themselves had been coming in since the late 1970s, a few a day, and once you've seen your own state from space with a storm sitting on it, you never look at the sky the same way.

Doppler radar came to the Weather Service sites in our part of the country in the early 1990s, the big new NEXRAD units, and that was the last great leap I saw before I retired. Doppler tells you not just where the rain is but which way the wind inside it is moving, and that's how you see a tornado starting to turn before it's on the ground. In 1966 we found out about tornadoes from the sheriff. In 1996 we could warn a town fifteen or twenty minutes ahead. I can't tell you what that's worth. I know what it's worth.

Everybody who does this job long enough gets one storm that becomes their name. Mine was the ice storm that started the evening of Thursday, February 7th, 1980, and didn't quit until Saturday.

The setup was a classic one, and I'd seen it in the books: cold air pooled at the surface, warm moist air riding up over it from the south. Rain falls through the warm layer, hits the cold layer at the ground, and freezes on contact to everything: trees, wires, roads, cars, cows. The Weather Service had freezing rain in the forecast. What nobody had was how long it would sit there. The whole thing just stalled on top of us.

I went on at six that Thursday and said, and I remember the words, "Folks, if you have a place to be tomorrow, be there tonight, because I don't think you're going anywhere in the morning." The news director thought I was overdoing it. By ten o'clock the first power lines were down. By Friday morning half the county was dark and the station was running on the generator.

We stayed on the air for about thirty hours straight. Three of us in the building, and me on camera every half hour with whatever I had: the radar, the observations coming in over the teletype until the teletype went down, and after that, people calling in. A fellow out on the county line called in to say his rain gauge was frozen solid with a full inch of ice in it. Folks called to say which roads were open, and I read them on the air with a county map and a grease pencil, like 1966. That's the picture that ran in the paper: me, unshaven, in a cardigan, pointing at a grease-pencil map with the blue wall dark behind me because the graphics system had gone down with the power.

Nobody in our county died in that storm, and I have always believed it's because people stayed home. People stayed home because somebody they'd watched every night for fourteen years told them to. That's the whole job. The rest of it is magnets.

They gave me a plaque. I've got it in the den. The cardigan I still have, too, and my wife has been trying to throw it out since 1980.

In thirty years I'd guess I got ten thousand letters, and I read every one, and I answered most. Some categories:

• "You ruined my picnic." The most common letter. I forecast rain, it didn't rain, they cancelled the picnic, and it was my fault. Or I forecast sun, it rained, and that was my fault too. I learned early to say "a chance of" and mean it. People hear what they want to hear.
• The folklore. Every fall a lady out in the country sent me a persimmon seed, split open, with a note telling me whether the kernel inside looked like a spoon, a knife or a fork. Spoon meant a lot of snow to shovel, knife meant a cutting cold wind, fork meant a mild winter. Old country folklore, and she believed it, and I'll tell you, I started reading them on the air, and her record was about as good as the five-day. I never told her that.
• The woolly bears. The caterpillars with the brown band in the middle. The wider the brown band, the milder the winter, or so the story goes. I got these in envelopes. Live. The mailroom girl was not pleased.
• The kids. Whole classrooms would write after a school visit. "Dear Mr. Winters, how do you know where the clouds are going?" I'd write back and tell them I asked the clouds. Then I'd tell them the real answer. Two of those kids went into meteorology and one of them is doing weather in a bigger market than I ever worked, and she still sends me a card at Christmas.
• The corrections. A retired schoolteacher wrote me every single time I said "less" when I meant "fewer." For twenty years. I miss her.
• The one I keep on the desk. A note from a farmer after the ice storm, three lines on a feed-store receipt: "Stayed home like you said. Barn roof came down at 4 a.m. Would have been in it. Thank you." That one's why I kept doing it.

People love to complain about the weatherman, and I've been on the receiving end, so let me say this plainly: the forecast you get tonight is far better than the one I gave in 1966, and it isn't because the people got smarter. It's because of three things.

The computers. The atmosphere is a physics problem, and the Weather Service has been running it on computers since the 1950s, but the computers in the 1960s could barely see past tomorrow. Every decade the machines got faster and the models got more detailed, and every decade the forecast got good one more day out. When I started, two days was honest. When I retired, the folks who study this said a three-day forecast was about as reliable as a one-day forecast had been in the '60s. From what I read, it's kept going that way since.

The eyes in the sky. Weather satellites, and then the geostationary ones that sit over the same spot and send back a picture every half hour. Before satellites we had the observers, the airports and the ships, and there were big holes over the oceans where a storm could hide for days. Now nothing hides.

The radar. I covered this above. From a blob on a scope to a color picture to Doppler that sees the wind. Warning time for tornadoes and flash floods went from nothing to real minutes, and minutes are lives.

Here's what didn't change: somebody still has to stand up and say it in plain English to people who are deciding whether to drive to Grandma's. The computer can't do that part. My grandson says one day it might. I told him a computer never dropped an "L" under the anchor desk and got a letter about it.

I did my last ten o'clock on June 28th, 1996. They let me use the old magnet map, which somebody had dragged up from the basement and dusted. I put an "H" over our county, said it looked like a nice weekend, and said good night. I still check the sky before I check the paper. I still can't wear a blue tie. And if you see red over your house, get inside.

Thanks for watching, all those years. It was a privilege to be the fellow in your living room.

Hal Winters
September 1999

Coming when my grandson has time: a page of my old forecast "bloopers" as I remember them, and my notes on the winter of 1977-78, which was the other one.