Fair-Weather Friends

Next to putting the cat out and kissing the wife goodnight, the most common late-evening ritual for many Americans is tuning in the TV weather forecast. Just about every TV station in the nation has its own weatherman nowadays, but the trouble with a great number of them is that they are cloudy and mostly windy.

In the beginning, weathermen talked so much about "occluded fronts" and "thermal inversions" that viewers wondered if they shouldn't start building an ark in the backyard. Then came the era of fair-weather girls. Preoccupied with their own frontal systems, they postured before the weather maps in the latest gowns and spun out sultry spiels. NBCs Tedi Thurman used to peek from behind a shower curtain to coo: "The Temperature in New York is 46, and me, I'm 36-26-36"

Now, in a drive to instill faith in the forecasts, stations are erecting radar towers and hiring meteorologists who are called "Dr." and give their reports from "Weather Central" -- a far corner in the studio. No matter that in many cities the U.S. Weather Bureau offers a recorded telephone service which gives all the weather a person wants or needs to know in 40 seconds or less.

Local newscasts devote more time to explaining a cold front in Canada than they do a war front in Viet Nam for the simple reason that a five-minute weather report wrapped around a commercial makes an attractive--and non-controversial--package for sponsors. Thus forecasts are padded with history ("108 years ago today the high was 67" ) and a flurry of arrows and isobars, maybes and howevers that enlighten no one but do serve as a hedge against any variation on the prediction short of a typhoon in Main Street .

Hansel & Gretel. Though many weathermen are content to inform a viewer whose wet socks are drying on the radiator that it rained today, a few have won their audiences through ingenuity. In New York City, Tex Antoine, head seer at WABC, puts the "sugar coating on a rather dull subject" by using Uncle Wethbee, a cartoon drawing whose mustache droops or curls according to the climate. "Half the fun," says Antoine, affixing a black eye on Uncle Wethbee, "is explaining the reason why a forecast fails"; the other half is collecting $100,000 a year for not failing too often.

WNBC's Dr. Frank Field, the Manhattan fellow whom Johnny Carson accuses of using a Hansel and Gretel clock to make his predictions, is actually a doctor of optometry. And appropriately so, for where others see a high-pressure area, Field sees "cold air coming off the Great Lakes like a locomotive without brakes."

Fozzle & Pleezy. Detroit's Sonny Eliot sees even more. Daily on WWJ he describes the weather as "colder than the seat of the last man on a short toboggan" or "uncomfortable as a swordfish with an ingrown nose." He sums up his forecasts as "fozzle" (fog and drizzle) crazy" (crisp and hazy), "pleezy" (pleasantly breezy) or "snowsy" (snow and lousy). He is thorny (thoroughly corny), but his report is the city's longest running (16 years) weather show and earns him $45,000 a year.

Sonny Eliot is the first to concede that his show is an "act," and like most TV weathermen, he survives more by force of personality than prognostication. In fact, weathermen draw their information largely, if not exclusively, from the same sources; as a result' when one local forecaster advises wearing galoshes, they all do. Their radarscopes and satellite photographs are diverting if not confusing, but once they get around to giving the forecast, most weathermen are about 85% accurate.

The importance of forecasts varies by locale. In Los Angeles, for example, KNXT's Bill Keene claims that "you can call for fair weather every day of the year, and you'll be 92% accurate." In Florida, where weather is a vital concern to citrus growers as well as vacationers, who delight in hearing how their neighbors are freezing back home WTVT in Tampa airs 70 minutes of forecasts daily. On one occasion, WTVT interrupted Walter Cronkite's Evening News to show five water spouts forming in the bay. In Boston, Don Kent styles his program as a kind of electronic Farmer's Almanac. By spot- checking a network of 60 ham-radio operators throughout New England, he keeps his WBZ viewers abreast of when and where the maple sap is running, the apple trees are blooming and the autumn foliage is turning.

Yet, save for impending hurricanes, droughts and floods, most viewers are concerned only with basic questions: Hot or cold? Rain or shine? As one hip pie informed a Los Angeles meteorologist: "Hey, man. Weather ain't good or bad. Weather just is."

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