Sunny and Mild: Getting to Know Our Fair-Weather Friends of Local News

On a recent May evening, the 11 p.m. news begins. A cadaver-sniffing dog smells something strange at Barker Ranch; Charles Manson may have buried more victims there. Deputies look for a mystery woman in connection with arson in Altadena. A missing San Diego couple’s boat is found washed up on a beach in Mexico. An earthquake rumbles in Riverside.

“Now for the weather out there,” says KNBC anchor Colleen Williams. “May gray and fog hanging around with us all week long. What about the weekend, you ask at this point? Fritz Coleman has the answers.”

Kevin Scanlon

The entertainer: Mark Thompson

Kevin Scanlon

Silver fox: Fritz Coleman

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• Fritz Coleman
• Mark Thompson
• Elita Loresca
• Weather
• Sciences

“Thanks, Colleen,” Coleman says. “Well, no doubt about it, a murky, overcast day today. Look at some current temperatures: These are ones that we’ve registered over the last half-hour or so. It’s cloudy and we’re filling in quickly. Here is a great example of what gives us a thick marine layer. You see the swirling of the air? When you get south of Santa Barbara County, it’s a great example of what the air does when the general airflow along the coast of California is parallel to the coast. It eddies. ... Now, how important is that thing going to be for your weekend? We’ll talk about it.”

Cue footage of Jenna Bush. She will wear an Oscar de la Renta dress at her wedding. In Upland, the FBI is tracking a trio of robbers. The police are looking for a ring of jewelry thieves. Then, summer travel tips. Then a doctor is arrested on sex-crime charges.

“Is it gonna warm up? Or stay cool?” asks anchor Paul Moyer this time. “Here’s Fritz Coleman.”

Kevin Scanlon

(Click to enlarge)

Silver fox: Fritz Coleman

“Outside tonight,” Coleman begins, “you can just see the grayness in the sky.”

Weather segments are typically split in two: a short 45-second-or-so teaser, followed by a two-minute weather report proper.

“Looks like the marine inversion’s not quite so strong tonight. But it could get a little soupy again Sunday morning,” Coleman concludes. “Maybe slightly longer-lasting low clouds and fog.”

Cut to ducks running amuck on the White House lawn.

Odd as it seems, the weather may be the last remaining bastion of useful information on the modern news program. Barring that, the mere sound of a strong voice reciting the numbers is a powerful, lulling thing, whether it belongs to an icon like Fritz or Mark or Dallas or Johnny or to a relative newcomer like Josh Rubenstein on CBS 2 and KCAL 9. When all else fails, these people assure us, we can always talk about the weather.

A Geek in Bronzed Wolf’s Clothing: Dallas Raines

Known for his dramatic flair in front of the map — there are entire Web sites devoted to the way he crouches — Raines is the ultimate weather alpha-nerd, the guy who can poke a head outside and tell you what the ambient temperature is within one degree of accuracy. He’s also a consummate storyteller. On a partly cloudy, slightly gusty 66-degree afternoon in Burbank, meteorologist Dallas Raines is holding court in the ABC7 Weather Center, sharing some of his best.

Story No. 1, or, How Dallas Fell in Love With the Weather: He was 8 years old, at school in the small Georgia town where he grew up, when the tornado came. His teacher ordered everybody into the basement, but Raines, drawn to the storm, snuck away and hid in a storage area. Looking to the west, he saw a massive cumulonimbus rotating supercell. At its base, the nascent tornado.

“Just then,” he says, lowering his voice for dramatic effect as if telling a chilling bedtime story, “something lifted me up off the floor. It was not the tornado ...it was the football coach.”

The coach grabbed Raines and stuck him into the basement. The tornado tore a path through the forest. Later on, having begged his parents to take him out to ground zero, Raines saw huge pines and pecans twisted and lifted up out of the earth. He inhaled their rich scent. How is it possible, he wondered, that wind could blow that hard?

There is an alternate tale of how Dallas fell in love with meteorology, which has to do with one particular old weathercaster he used to watch in the 1960s, before the days of Doppler cam and satellites, who would draw every low-pressure front and where it was going on a blackboard with chalk. He’d get chalk everywhere — on his pants, hair, shirt — and at the end, as a gimmick, he would throw the chalk up in the air. If he caught it, his forecast would be accurate. If he dropped it, it meant the forecast would be wrong.

“He was kinda geeky,” Raines recalls, “but he had tremendous passion for it. By the end, his presentation looked like chicken scratch. Watching that guy, you learned how the weather moved.”