Johnny-on-the-Spot … by John Foster …

As a kid growing up in northern Ohio, I was lucky enough to have a United States Weather Bureau office located at the Mansfield Municipal Airport.

It later became known as the National Weather Service office but I think it was there because we had an active wing of the Air National Guard stationed there.

One of the neat things was the weather station would broadcast a detailed summary and forecast several times a day.

The local radio station, where I would later work at, would rebroadcast that weather information several times a day.

I got to hear voices like Ed Jacobs, Charles Miller and Dewey Peters give local statistics and the forecast and it probably spurred my youthful interest in building a backyard weather station.

I would log readings daily and even cut out newspaper weather maps which I glued onto pages of stenographer notebooks along with my observations.

The early broadcast meteorologists mainly came from the military.

In Cleveland, Ohio, we watched Wally Kinnan the Weather Man who was a WWII B-17 bomber pilot who was shot down over Germany and was a POW for two years.

Dick Goddard was a weather legend in northeast Ohio.

He was the 1st meteorologist on Cleveland TV and holds the Guinness Book of Records mark for longest career as a weather forecaster (51 years and 6 days).

He gained fame with the Wooly Bear Festival.

Dick Goddard and I were both USAF veterans and spent time in Greenland.

Later we saw Hoolihan the Weather Man (Bob Wells) who started to entertain us with jokes and splashy graphics in Cleveland in the 60’s and 70’s.

WJW-TV sought a “funny weatherman” and Hoolihan fit the bill and always closed his forecasts with “Sunshine to you no matter what the weather.”

He’s probably better known for the “Hoolihan and the Big Chuck Show on Friday nights from 1966 until 1979.

They aired “Z-grade” monster movies, replacing the iconic Ernie Anderson (Ghoulardi) in that time slot.

We had a TV meteorologist who provided weather for our stations in the 80’s.

Larry Cosgrove worked for WSYX in Columbus, Ohio and he was a real weather geek.

I would occasional hear from him asking if I wanted to go storm-chasing.

(You can actually arrange tours for that in season.)

Female weather forecasters were starting to show up then but initially, the focus was on short skirts and cleavage and not so much on weather knowledge.

I used to refer to those types as “cumulo-bimbuses” and that cracked up Mr. Cosgrove.

Today, though, there are many knowledgeable women forecasters on the air.

Weather geeks like me lauded May, 1982 when the Weather Channel was launched.

A channel dedicated to weather? OMG!

But it started to get “too Hollywoody” and a tad political for me.

Splashy graphics and I can only stand so many live shots of reporters trying to stand up in gusting hurricane winds or winter storms.

Hurricanes were given “female” names from 1953 through 1978, and 99 storm names have been retired, starting with “Carol”.

I never understood with “:male” names which were added in 1979 unless there was a “P-C” element brought up.

“Bob” was the first “dude” name for a hurricane.

But I think deciding to name winter storms was a bit too much.

It started in the fall of 2012 with “Athena”.

Plus the verbiage used to forecast and report on storms has taken on a more dramatic turn.

Everything has become “horrendous”, “debilitating”, “life-threatening” or “catastrophic”.

I also feel weather “warnings” get misused because technology allows forecasters to peer high in to the sky and detect cloud rotation long before any funnels ae formed.

I fear the result with be like the little boy crying “Wolf!” with folks failing to react because they’ve had so many “false” alarms before.

Again, one man’s opinion.

But I remain a “weather geek” and prefer to lean on my own weather memory and watching the clouds and wind direction.

Modern computer science and weather satellites allow today’s forecaster to see “further out” but it still comes down to studying and reviewing before calling for the next “mega-storm”.

No matter how good the graphics look on the screen, true weather knowledge still makes a difference.

When oit’s cold and snowy, folks yearn for a thaw and when it’s hot and dry, they wonder when the next cooling rains will come/

That’s why you might see me wetting my finger and looking in the direction the wind is blowing before I’ll fuel up my snow-thrower or get ready to mow the lawn.