Page 110 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

CHAPTER 32 - Significant Weather vs. Major News

On June 6, 1968, Tropical Storm Abby moved across our area on the morning that
presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated. I came to the TV station
around 7 AM and CBS had continuous coverage of the event. But torrential rains and
fifty-mile per hour winds were approaching our southeast Georgia and northeast
Florida viewers. Our television station was their main source of weather information.
This was before the Chiron crawl system was developed. The only method we had to
run crawl information was to use a typewriter with a white ribbon to print white letters
on a two-inch wide black plastic tape. The tape would run in front a small TV camera
that inserted it to the bottom of the TV screen. To illustrate the location of the storm, I
pasted a tiny white map of our area and attached a black circle (from black art paper
from a hole-puncher) to portray the latest storm position. By this method, I conveyed
reports of the storm that dumped 6 inches of rain and brought 66 mph winds to the
airport and 71 mph winds to Jacksonville Beach.

On August 24-25, a powerful category 4 hurricane, Cleo, ripped across southern
Hispaniola and Cuba on a course toward southern Florida. The mountains of Cuba had
reduced the hurricane to tropical storm strength and it was expected to pass only a few
miles east of Miami on the night of August 26. But the storm rapidly regained
hurricane-force strength over shallow waters near Biscayne Bay that were much
warmer than the offshore Gulf Stream current. This caused the weaker western side of
the hurricane to suddenly approach 100 mph shortly after midnight. When wind gusts
reached 135 mph, Miamians who had been told that the hurricane force winds would
pass a short distance offshore were rudely awakened by the hurricane’s fury.

Afterwards, U.S. Senator George Smathers asked for an investigation of the Miami
Weather Bureau. Gordon Dunn, an experienced hurricane forecaster, detailed reasons
why there was an unforeseen strengthening of the storm in the Monthly Weather
Review’s published summary of the 1964 hurricane season.

The key to the danger for Jacksonville was whether the storm would weaken and
remain mainly over land between Miami and Jacksonville, or whether it would emerge
into the Atlantic around Cape Canaveral and intensify to a strong hurricane off our
coast. I stayed on air all night, reporting the storm’s center each hour. It was a detailed
roadmap that I had pasted on a poster board. From the each of the hourly weather

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