Rochester Gives Me a Snow Job… Part 2

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.

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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.

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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!!!