Page 142 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

While in Minneapolis, we spent a day at the Mall of America, a huge three-story
building adjacent to a playground that had many rides, including a log roll and a roller
coaster. It was like a compact Disneyland for Amanda, being a nine-year-old girl!

In 2002, Channel 4 had a two-year reunion of veteran employees from the years prior to
1980 at Jacksonville Beach. It was called “Four ever 4” which was a gathering that
brought many nationally known reporters including Mike Patrick of ESPN and Steve
Kroft of CBS 60 Minutes.

In 2003, I served on Duval County’s Urban Horticultural Committee, participated in
the Memorial Park 5 Mile Cancer walk with my Granddaughter Amanda and her
friend, Madeline Bronson. Brad Nitz joined our weather staff, a tremendous asset. He
was well-known for his reporting the 1998 central Florida tornado outbreak on
February 2-3 that caused 42 fatalities.

These were my years of recording neighborhood weather. Each day, I drove to a
different neighborhood or community with my camera and tripod to capture a
15-second movie of their weather. I tried to capture a type of weather that was either
unique for that locale or different from that which was occurring in Jacksonville. I’d
drive more than a hundred non-reimbursed miles to film things like Jekyll Island in
Georgia or the sunny beach at Palm Coast, FL where a large condo was under
construction, or around the smoke of a burning Okefenokee Swamp for a shot of my
walking away from the community store in Fargo, GA.

A couple of times after shooting a scene in Lake City and Bryceville, I had placed my
camera in the car trunk and driven about ten miles towards Jacksonville before
remembering that had left my tripod at the film site. That mishap made my trip back 20
miles longer. A long round trip to Waycross or Palatka to show a brief clip of their
community in my 6 o’clock weather report was boring, but I always thought it was the
least I could do to connect them with our broadcast studio in downtown Jacksonville.

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