Sunday, June 9, 2019

Weather on the Quarter Hour

I’ve been thinking about the weather a lot this week for two reasons. First, a friend retired last Friday after a 40 plus year career as a well respected meteorologist on television. Second, after a long, hot dry spell, the temperatures have cooled a little and we have had rain almost every day.

Weather forecasts are something that you don’t hear on the radio much these days. But back in the day we had “weather on the quarters,” you could count on getting the weather forecast four times per hour. It was part of the newscasts broadcast on the top and bottom of each hour, and there was a stand-alone weather forecast at a quarter after and a quarter till each hour. The primary reason we did the weather a lot more then than it is done now is that the broadcasters were the only source of weather to the public other than calling the weather bureau on the phone; an impossible thing to do in the days before wide spread use of mobile telephones.

Left: Typical local forecast from the weather teletype. Radio and television stations got the weather forecasts via a network of teletype machines connected to the local weather office, in our case, located at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport. We would get the detailed forecast and a shorter summary once every three hours or so. And about 5 minutes before the hour we would get the latest actual weather conditions in the major cities in the state. Those would consist of the temperature, sky conditions and wind speed and direction. We would cut the forecast and the current conditions out of the 8 1/2“ wide teletype paper with large scissors. The 2 inch strip with the current conditions would lie on a pair of switches over the cue speaker between the VU meters of the audio board, and the 5 -7 inch long forecast went on the desk over to the right besides the stack of up and coming 45’s.

The problem with this is that we received the current conditions only once per hour and the weather could change a lot between the updates, especially in the summer. To make matters worse, every radio studio in which I did a show with the exception of one and a half either had no window or the window was behind the DJ when he or she was speaking into the microphone. The one was the booth out at Doug Broome’s Drive in at WCOS which had three 4’ x 8’ windows facing the great out of doors. When I first started at WCOS, the control room had no window for the first couple of years I was there. When Milton, our engineer came aboard, one of the first things he did was to uncover the window in the control room directly in front of the audio board and we could finally see if the weather conditions have changed since the last hourly report.

When I built my broadcast studio in my home, I made sure that I could see out two windows from the microphone position. One looks west and the other north.

Back in the day, we had to be careful to read the weather forecast verbatim and not ad-lib funny stuff into it. I learned my lesson the hard way one rainy day when I quipped “It is raining cats and dogs out there, I know because I just stepped into a poodle.” Sure enough, the studio line rang and I heard the voice of John Purvis, the chief meteorologist at the Columbia Weather Office telling me that I needed to take the weather more seriously when reading their forecasts and not make jokes about it. He was OK with joking about the weather at other times but not during the official forecast. That phone call was the beginning of a long friendship with John. When I was giving after hours flying lessons in the 70’s I would be sure to take my students down the runway to the weather service office so they could meet John and his crew face to face. I would have the pleasure of working with John after he retired from NOAA and worked in the South Carolina State Climate Office.

John became somewhat of a local celebrity when we hit upon the idea of having him call the station and record the latest forecast. We had it on a cart and would play it “in his words” and just have the DJs read the latest hourly update. One of the things I remember about that period was the FCC required beep that was put on the studio phone line every 15 seconds. Supposedly that beep was to remind the person on the other end of the telephone line that they could be put on the air or recorded. Really, why else would you be calling the studio line of a radio station? Well, you could be making a request, but why would that matter? I’m sure glad that is not longer required. I hated that sound, especially when it came through the station’s reverb unit.

These days, because there are numerous weather outlets available on the internet, I do the weather only twice an hour, at a quarter past and a quarter till the hour, and that is to keep as close to the “50’s and 60’s radio experience” as I can. Heck, I’d probably do a short newscast on the top and bottom of the hour too if I had a source for local headline news. I’m just too busy in the studio to be able to write the headlines myself. Besides, my handwriting has gotten so bad that I probably could not read what I had just written. BTW, don’t tell me to use a computer, there are three of those in the studio and all of them are running almost to the point where they are nearly smoking. The one where I get my weather has three active windows already open on it.

Which bring up the “TTBB” conundrum. Rick Sklar, the iconic program director at WABC in New York came up with the idea of “Time, Temperature, Boom-Boom. After every song, his DJs would announce the “WABC temperature” or the “WABC Chime Time” the latter accompanied with an actual chime that was pre recorded at the end of a song. Many stations, including WCOS followed suit, so we were instructed to always “TTBB” give the time and or the temperature. Time was easy, we had that big Western Union clock hanging on the wall in front of us, and at our finger tips was a button that rang a doorbell chime whenever pressed. Temperature was a little harder; we had to write the latest temperature on the edge of the teletype copy that contained the forecast. Time is still easy; there is a big digital clock on the automation computer that remains synced to the NIST Internet time service. I have a sound file of a chime I can play when needed. Temperature is a bit more difficult; it changes a lot more often than the hourly reports we used to get. It is also only available on one of the three windows that I have open on my busy auxiliary computer. That window is “on top” only during the times that I’m actually doing the weather. So the other times I don’t have the current temperature at my fingertips. And before you say “Weather Bug” to me, I don’t have administrative rights to that computer and even if I did, I don’t want to load a tool on that computer that in all likelihood I would be the only one using.

So, tomorrow I’ll be “TBB’ing” instead of “TTBB’ing”. You will hear the chime time every so often and the current temperature near the weather forecasts on “the 15’s”. If I am doing the show alone you just might hear the temperature more often because I’ll write it down on the paper where I have printed the “on this day in history” events and birthdays the previous day. I have tried my “Swiss Cheese” memory in the past with disastrous results, sometimes “off by 20 degrees” disastrous. Oh MY!

No comments:

Post a Comment