I’m suspecting most of you have figured out already what happened, but I figured I would create some exaggerated suspense. I guess I can’t shake the local news hype machine entirely just yet, but I’m working on it.

In any event, I was indeed offered the position as the weekend evening weather anchor at WROC Rochester, channel 8.  My schedule had me on the 6 & 11PM newscasts Saturday and Sunday, and fill in for Kevin Williams the chief meteorologist, who often took off for the weekend early and would need me to work the 11PM Friday nights. 

So I’m just crazy happy and anxious and nervous about this, the beginning of what I hope is going to be a dream come true. The boy from Ozone Park, Queens who drew handmade weather maps in notebooks since 2nd grade is going to be a TV weatherman.

In my teens I had a weather map on my bedroom wall, next to my Clash poster and of course Farrah Fawcett poster.  I would perform mock weather casts in my bedroom.  I’m sure sometimes family members walked passed the room and thought I was losing it. Now at last I was going to do it for real!  On a real TV station in front of people!  Holy crap!  Now I’m scared.

The next major fly in the ointment was trying to sell my wife on the idea of moving to Rochester, NY. First of all, pretty much both of our entire families lived in the Tri-State area, as well as all of our friends.  Secondly, the winters are brutal in Rochester and my wife was not exactly a snow bunny. Last, but certainly not least, my wife had a very successful career going as an accountant and this job was part time, with no benefits and was going to pay me…….get ready…….hope you’re sitting down…..$8 an hour.  That could temper your excitement in a hurry.  

I had my son at this point who was not even two years old.and I was clamoring for ways to make this work.

Kevin Williams had a private weather service he was running in addition to his TV gig and was generous enough to offer me some work in addition to my part time TV position.  Even with that, economically it was suicide. We had to decide whether we could move up to Rochester for an income that was one third of what we were currently bringing home for the pursuit of my TV weatherman dream. 

To my wife’s credit, she did come along a couple of weekends to take a look at some potential places to live in Rochester. We checked out several apartments and different neighborhoods. However, I might as well have been trying to sell flies to someone who runs a manure factory.  It wasn’t going to happen.

So desperate times require desperate measures. I decided to take the job, but would commute from  East Brunswick each weekend and my family would stay put in New Jersey.  I would usually leave Friday afternoon or early Saturday morning and drive the 365 miles up to Rochester.  I booked a hotel and had to rent a car. So you can imagine I was working on TV, my dream job in market size 71 at the time, and I was losing money.  I just figured the payment was in the form of experience and a resume tape for the next job.

Of course as luck would have it, they wanted my first show to be on Friday the 13th of November.  Fortunately, I had a previous locked in engagement so my first night was Saturday, November 14th, 1991. 

My first weekend heading  up to Rochester, my wife thought it better I relieve some of the stress by flying instead of driving. Well that didn’t work out according to plan.  As soon as I got to the airport I discovered my flight was not delayed, but canceled. I scrambled to catch a flight a few hours later and ended up getting to Rochester later than if I had driven. So much for no added stress.

I was fine in setting up my show and preparing my forecast with the graphic system. Everyone at the station was helpful and couldn’t have been nicer.

The format of the show required a quick weather tease in the first block of the newscast from the weather center. I liked that idea because I could make my TV debut, but only had about 20-30 seconds to screw it up. Seemed like warming up in the bullpen for the main long weather segment to come.

As the show started I was already in position in the weather center even though the tease was a good 6-8 minutes away.

In hindsight that might have been a mistake.  I was, and still am not someone who ever rehearsed a weathercast. Weather is the only entirely ad-libbed segment in a newscast and I liked keeping it fresh and spontaneous. Years of doing unscripted radio and painting the weather picture only verbally left me feeling pretty confident about what to say.  However, as I’m sitting there, panic and fear are now racing through my heart and head.

I remembered beginning to feel sick and faint and with less than a minute to my tease. The idea of bolting and running out came into my head. However, some other voice in my head grabbed me, and started yelling at me. “Have you lost your mind! You’ve been wanting this since you were 8 years old, you are not running out on it now, this is a dream come true, so enjoy it!” 

I’m not going to lie and say I completely calmed down, but it certainly kept me from running. The rest was kind of a blur.  I knocked out the tease uneventfully and did my first weathercast fairly smoothly, from what I remember .

Over time, I became more comfortable, but the road trips up there did not. Keep in mind, I was now traveling from central New Jersey into the lake effect snowbelt in the months of November thru March. I would generally leave with decent conditions in New Jersey, then some flurries by the Poconos, then snow showers into the New York state border , and then whiteout snow squalls, anywhere from Syracuse on into Rochester.

On one particular drive up the conditions kept varying greatly. From sunshine into a squall, then back to sunshine, then another squall. The roads were heavily treated with salt and usually were just wet. However, the salt water spray on the windshield would be thick and hard to see through, especially when the sun came back out creating glare. Normally I would just use the windshield wiper fluid to clear the view.

However, this one day the temperature had plummeted to below zero and the wind chills were 25 to 35 below zero. When I went to hit the fluid button nothing happened. I couldn’t see as the salt kept coating the windshield and I would hit the fluid again but got nothing. It was so cold the line had frozen. I drove the last few miles into Rochester with a ball of paper towels in one hand, my other hand on the steering wheel, and with the window rolled down I would rub out a little clear porthole on my windshield big enough for me to see through and drive. I can’t imagine what this looked like to other drivers but again…desperate times call for desperate measures.

My time in Rochester was short, but I made a good friend while there by the name of Jim Lytle. James was a meteorologist with a cable news network in Rochester and was also a minister. He reached out to me, as he knew I was from out of town, and eventually offered me a room with a mattress on the floor in his home. He also had taken in an exchange student from RIT and offered a room to him as well. Let’s just say that got me through that first and only winter I had to spend in Rochester. He is a generous and kind human being for whom I ultimately ended up as an usher in his wedding, just a few years later, and we are friends to this day.

So ends the story of my first TV weather job. There’s more to the story, but I’ll save that for a possible book down the road. WNEP Scranton was my next stop. You didn’t think I got to WNBC without paying dues now did you?!

If you’ve gotten this far I thank you.

Sunshine always!!!

The post Rochester Gives Me a Snow Job… Part 2 appeared first on Weathering Your 50s & Beyond.

While in college and shortly after graduating I started working for private weather companies called Metro Weather and Compu-Weather, both based in Queens in New York City. While working for them I learned on the fly about forecasting the weather for locations all around the country and Canada. These are the jobs where I honed my broadcasting skills by delivering daily forecasts, live and on tape, to many radio stations nationwide. I think I will eventually do a blog about those experiences as well, as they were also an important part of my growth and journey. For this particular blog however, I want to share my first TV experience with all of you.

Trying to break into television in the early 1990’s was not an easy task. I did not come out of college with an internship and a demo tape in hand. Things were a bit different back then. I managed to make my demo tape through a friend, Ted Baer, who was a DJ at a radio station up in Binghampton NY, WENE. Ted and I became friends on air at first and then off air after several months. After a couple of years of working together he left the industry and opened up a clock shop in the quaint town of Emmaus, PA. Turned out one of his biggest customers was the General Manager of the local Allentown, PA TV station, WFMZ, channel 69. With my friend Ted’s persuasion, I was able to get into the studio and bang out three takes of a weathercast. My first time in front of a camera, and I only got three shots and hoped that one of them was something I could put on a resume reel to send out for that first TV job.

I took that tape and applied for jobs in South Bend, Indiana, Columbia, Missouri, Baton Rouge, LA, Syracuse, NY, the list of small towns went on and on. I did this, never telling my wife, who I knew wouldn’t be keen on any of those places, but I figured I would deal with that situation, when, and if the time came.

Eventually I got a nibble at an opening for weekend meteorologist in Rochester, NY, WROC channel 8, the CBS affiliate. I was excited and over the moon at the prospect of this possibly being the beginning of my dream coming true to be a TV meteorologist.

It was early November 1991 and I was living in East Brunswick, NJ. They weren’t about to fly me up for an interview, so I knew I had to suck it up and drive up to Rochester to try and seal the deal. The drive was 365 miles, roughly 6 hours depending on traffic and the weather. I remember that morning waking up 6 AM with butterflies in my stomach, hoping the long drive would calm me down. Little did I know what I was in for.

I checked the weather and it looked like rain most of the way up to Rochester, maybe tapering off just before I got there, assuming on a 2PM arrival. I left East Brunswick under a heavy grey sky with a light chilly rain falling and temperatures in the 40s. So off I went with my little beige Nissan Sentra to Kodak land and Rochester, NY.

Back in the early 90’s most cars didn’t have outdoor temperature readings on the dashboard. I certainly didn’t on my Nissan. Unbeknownst to me, while I expected the temperature to be dropping as I drove north, I wasn’t, as most forecasters that day, prepared for how quickly the cold air was seeping into upstate New York. As I got to the PA/NY border, I started to hear the pitter patter of sleet on my windshield.

As a meteorologist I found this amusing as it was early in the season for frozen precipitation. I was still more concerned with nailing this interview and not paying too much attention to the rapidly changing weather conditions taking place outside my car as I pushed northward. Whatever rain was falling was now just about completely transitioned over to sleet and freezing rain. Suddenly the roads were getting a slushy glaze on them.

What seemed like in a matter of minutes, I went from driving on wet roads to driving on a skating rink. Tractor trailers were jack-knifing and being ditched on the side of the road. Cars were spinning out everywhere, as now snow was mixing in with the rest of the icy potpourri. I decided I should get off the thruway and take a break and give the crews a chance to treat the roads. Obviously they were caught off guard as well. The next exit was Marathon, NY.

As I got into the right lane to take the exit I could feel the car shimmy on the road. The exit ramp did a quick bend to the right and then back to the left just as quickly. Well my little Sentra took the first right of the exit but never had a chance at cutting back left. It all happened in slow motion, but my car kept sliding right when I needed it to go left, until it went into the guard rail which was two metal wire cables. My rear bumper got caught on the cable and my car spun around in a 180 with my tire getting blown out hitting the opposite guard rail. Fortunately nobody was near enough to hit me, but the damage was done.

I waited about an hour for a tow truck as cars were ditching left and right at this point. They finally got to me and towed me to a Nissan dealer. They then told me it would be at least another couple of hours before they could repair my rim and tire. I was stranded in Marathon, NY trying to get to my interview for my first TV job. What a great first impression.

I got to a diner and was able to make a call on the pay-phone( yes, pay-phone, no cell phones yet in 1991). They were great at the station and totally understood and were concerned that I was OK. This whole fiasco had now taken away any nerves I had about the interview. I guess that was the good news about the unexpected complication in getting there.

No offense to Marathon, NY, but there wasn’t much to do in this town of 1,800 people. Waiting for my car to be repaired and getting back on the road was now becoming a personal marathon.

I finally got to the station around 5PM, a little more than 9 hours after I left East Brunswick. I got there just in time to meet the News Director and General Manager who were both very understanding of the stressful journey I was trying to settle down from.

I remember watching the 6PM newscast and meeting the chief meteorologist, Kevin Williams. Kevin was a native Long Islander and couldn’t have been nicer. We went to dinner after the show and he assured me I pretty much had the job. That allowed me a huge exhale after what had been an incredibly stressful white-knuckled day.

So did I get offered the job? Did I take it? Did I move my young family to Rochester? I’ll answer those questions and more with part 2 coming up by the weekend..

Once again, if you’ve made it this far, thank you. Sunshine always.

The post Rochester Gives Me a Snow Job appeared first on Weathering Your 50s & Beyond.