Wow, not bad considering I needed a local college tutor, in Fort Smith, to pass my math classes. My daughter is now a freshman honors business student at Texas A&M (Mays Business School). Hale says she is me in female form.īoth my children make me smile, but Camryn makes me laugh out loud when she drives her tiny sports car at the speed of light. In 2002 our daughter Camryn came into this world as a fifth generation Texan. I have had the opportunity to add several extreme weather events to my resume including the Christmas Eve snow of ’04, Hurricane Dolly in ’08, Hurricane Hanna, and the February freeze. She pushed me very hard to get the new seal. Six months of study for a test that encompassed almost all of the science of meteorology, and I passed it with room to spare. After a quick check of the map, I knew we were heading to Texas.Ī few years ago I decided to challenge my brain and go for the new American Meteorological Society’s Certified Broadcast Meteorologist Seal of Approval. In 1999, I got a call to be the chief meteorologist for KGBT CBS 4. However, I realized I wanted to return to an environment where I could have more elbow room and be free to express myself. The urge to gain experience in large market TV drew me to Kansas City, where I learned more about weather and television than I ever thought possible. It wasn’t long before our son Quentin was born and we had a family. It wasn’t a problem since we’d already been together a few years, and I was used to her running the show. We were both hired on at WLEX-TV in Lexington, Kentucky, where I was the morning meteorologist and she was my boss. She’s a fourth generation Texan, so we were married in Anderson, Texas. The station offered to pay my way through a university meteorological program, and that started me down the path. I didn’t know much about weather, but I loved geography and I knew every county, city and “one horse town” between Oklahoma City and Memphis. The weekend weather person had gone, and my boss asked me if I wanted to fill in. Once I got into TV at KFSM in Fort Smith, Arkansas, it only took a few months before the “weather bug” bit me. I then returned to Arkansas for that first job. I then moved to Arkansas in the early 80’s where I graduated from high school, received my degree in broadcast journalism at Southern Illinois University, studied with the BBC in Britain, and interned with a major cable news network in Washington D.C. I cut my teeth as an intern for Arkansas’s Second Congressional District long before I was tracking severe weather in that state.īorn in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I lived through the winter of ’78 and dug a tunnel out of my house through a record snowfall. My first passion was for journalism and politics. Almost every meteorologist’s biography you read on any website starts out with, “I knew I wanted to be a meteorologist from the time I was a kid.”
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