Robert A. Mills, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Robert A. Mills
BULL'S EYE! 10/16/2009 11:08:09 AM
For the better part of twenty years I was the “weatherman of note” on local TV in Western New York. Lucky to have the job, I parlayed an interest in show business into a niche as the most watched and “wannabee” television personality of the day (I still get emails from aging fans who claim they want to grow up and become me. Sickos.)
Not being a meteorologist or a trained, qualified student of natural phenomena, I approached the dissemination of weather information from a platform of humor and outlandish costumes, inane rhetoric and ingenious vaudevillian “bits.” I was light-years ahead of Willard Scott and many others, but unfortunately I spent my entire career with a stodgy local firm that was always mysteriously at odds with my success. (“I cringe when he’s on,” sang my employers in tight harmony, “but, dammit, he’s money in the bank!”)
Now that I’m a retired senior citizen, I can enjoy newspaper articles by writers who seem to justify their existence by concocting inkwells of information about TV’s halcyon days; and one question they always ask is, “When you finally got around to talking about the weather, what was your source?”
I had three: a phone call to the local weather bureau forty-five minutes before showtime provided the temperature, humidity and other standard “values;” but I relied mostly on the two Farmers’ Almanacs for the inside on the outside’s skinny. Come to think of it, I still do.
A quick reading of one of them—the “Farmers’ Almanac”—indicates 2009-10 will be a frigid, unusually cold winter in most of the country. Here in the Southeast (my primary concern) it will be milder and dryer than normal (the ravages of the September flood in Georgia notwithstanding.) The Northeast and Great Lakes’ states will suffer the cold, hard nails of winter the most (tough.)
Let me hasten to add, I’m referring to the “Farmer’s Almanac,” not the “Old Farmers’ Almanac” published in New Hampshire. Actually, I made use of them both—and so should you. You cannot truly hope to predict the weather with any degree of accuracy unless you distill information from the two of them.
In fact, let me share with you my recipe for serious meteorologically prognostication:
Take equal ounces of data, anticipation, old wives’ tales, medical anomalies and gravestone inscriptions at least a hundred years old . . . mix thoroughly in a copper cauldron with a dash of info from NOAA . . . heat over peat logs in a walk-in fireplace similar to the one in the slave quarters at the Robert Mills House in Columbia, S.C. When it boils, ladle into silver chalices, let cool, sip gingerly and digest contentedly while the wind roars outside and the drizzle beats a melancholy tattoo on your isinglass windows.
I made a good living for a number of years with this sort of magic. How correct was I?
Well, there was a barometer of accuracy invented by one of my many producers, and it was called simply “the bull’s eye.”
At the end of each show we would predict the overnight Low Temperature and tomorrow’s High Temp. To hit it right on the schnooze resulted in a visual (eventually in living color!) “bull’s eye.” I had an arrangement with management that I’d receive a bonus each week of $5 for every “bull’s eye” and $15 for a Double “Bull’s Eye”—a bonus never to exceed $30 a week. This could, conceivably, reach as much as $1,500 a year!
Well, of course, my 20-year average score was 92% single “bull’s eyes” and 83% doubles, but management paid off only in the first week. Some shop steward got wind of it and informed AFTRA, the announcers’ union, and that was, as they say, all she wrote.
Another question I’m always asked: “Why did you take so long to retire?”
We, like so many less fortunate neighbors and co-residents of metro Atlanta and North George, are recovering from the fiasco of the recent flood—we more easily than many who lost so much more. Hundreds of homes and businesses were completely destroyed, making our basement/office flood damage seem little more than an expensive inconvenience. If you have watched local and network newscasts, you know there are at least ten families who will never recover their ultimate loss.
I will do all possible to continue these bi-weekly Soggy Blogs. Stay tuned.
