#Weather channel meteorologist dies professional#
#Weather channel meteorologist dies tv#

One of his favorite songs was “Nature Boy” by Nat King Cole, which contains a line Coleman repeated often: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.”Ĭoleman is survived by his wife, Linda their son, Scott Coleman their daughter, Susan Keim Coleman’s brothers Richard and Philip daughter-in-law Vidalia Coleman and numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren. “He had a personality that was brighter than the sun. “John was someone who always took time to talk to other people, to help them,” Scott said. On Sunday afternoon, the discussion was more focused on Coleman, the man. He stood by what he thought to be true.”Ĭoleman was so convinced of his beliefs that he eventually dropped out of the American Meteorological Society, which had named him AMS Broadcast Meteorologist of the Year in 1983. Those kind of remarks have been largely dismissed by the mainstream scientific community, and by Pope Francis, who issued an encyclical in 2015 that says, in part, “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.” He told people global warming was a “scam” and a “hoax,” and he hotly criticized people like Al Gore and Bill Nye, the Science Guy. I’m here for you.’ From that moment on we were friends for life.”Ĭoleman experienced some rough moments of his own, especially when it came to the subjects of global warming and climate change. “I heard this voice say, ‘Davey, I heard about your son. Scott also remembers the moment when he was standing in the station’s parking lot, looking upset and lost because his son Connery had been born with medical complications. At first, I don’t think that he realized what he’d done. “John just sort of sang out the UUUUUU, which really caught on. “We got a memo from management asking us to emphasize one of the letters in KUSI to help viewers remember it,” Scott said. From there, he went on to do the weather in New York and Chicago, then landed at KUSI in San Diego in 1994, when he was 60. But he left after about a year due to internal friction. But Coleman liked a gamble, something reflected in his love for the Sinatra song “Luck be a Lady.”Ĭoleman got the Weather Channel - or TWC - up and going in 1981.

#Weather channel meteorologist dies professional#

The whole thing was a bit of a professional gamble. But the idea led to the creation of the Weather Channel, and for a while Coleman served as the network’s president, CEO and as a meteorologist.

But when serious weather was unfolding, he sharpened his focus, giving people the information they needed.Ībout seven years later, Coleman proposed the creation of a 24-hour-a-day national weather network, which some broadcasters thought was ludicrous. Much of the time, Coleman let loose with animated happy talk, hoping to entertain the viewer. In the mid-70s, Coleman moved on to “Good Morning America,” which became a powerhouse with its hosts Joan Lunden and David Hartman. “Up until then, forecasters used a felt-tipped pen and wrote backward on Plexiglas plates so that they could give detail,” Scott said.

#Weather channel meteorologist dies tv#

Then he got a big-time gig at WLS-TV in Chicago, where he and a colleague pushed TV forward technologically by developing a Chroma key that allowed the station to project images behind Coleman while he gave the forecast. It was 1953 and, before long, he was tapped to do the weather by Champaign’s WCIA-TV.Ĭoleman worked his way up the TV food chain, with stops in Peoria, Ill. In a classic showbiz story, Coleman ended up filling in one day when the weatherman for the college station didn’t show up for work. “He really had the pipes for it his voice boomed,” said Dave Scott, a KUSI weatherman who worked with Coleman for 20 years. His father, Claude, was a college professor and his mother, Hazel, was a math teacher.Ĭoleman attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the 1950s and got deeply involved with radio. 15, 1934, in Alpine, Texas, a small town southeast of El Paso. You made so many of us happy, may you rest in peace and thank you.”Ĭoleman was born on Oct. “I was happily surprised when I moved to the San Diego area and found you were ‘my’ weatherman again on KUSI News.

I am originally from Chicago and I grew up watching you forecast the sun and the snow. Linda Newell, one of the station’s viewers, wrote on KUSI’s Facebook on Sunday, “Dear John Coleman, you made me smile for years. “Like a strike of lightning, a clap of thunder and a ray of sunshine, legendary weatherman John Coleman was an exciting, powerful and humorous force in the lives of so many,” KUSI evening anchor Sandra Maas said Sunday on Twitter.