Page 88 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

I realized that a broadcasting career would involve a lot more than just forecasting the
weather; subsequently, I searched for a book that would help me in public relations. I
found such a book written by Elmer Wheeler called “How to Put Yourself Across”.
Wheeler was described as America’s most successful salesman. As a Christian, I
studied the Bible about God’s commandments and Solomon’s proverbs. After reading
the book, I was impressed how much his tips reinforced much of what I had been
studying over the years. I had been looking for clues about successful living from
biographies of historical people like Benjamin Franklin, Wilbur and Orville Wright and
Thomas Edison. Finally, I gave the book to my pastor, Rev. Carlton Owens of the
Riverview Baptist Church in Jacksonville.

I was first assigned as Weather Observer at the airport that was originally called
Jacksonville Municipal Airport. For the airport’s inauguration ceremony in October
1927, Charles Lindbergh arrived with his “Spirit of St. Louis” airplane. It had just
completed the first solo transatlantic flight a few months earlier. Here I was 30 years
later taking weather observations for airlines like Eastern, National, and United airlines
to land and take off. Being near the Atlantic Ocean and the St. Johns River, it was
important to report the dangerous fogs that occasionally covered the runways. On one
foggy morning in 1957, an Eastern Air Lines Constellation clipped a few tall pine trees
short of the runway, crashed and burned killing 12 passengers and 5 crewmembers.
Also, the aircraft was transporting the body of a deceased airline employee northward
in the casket.

I was excited about my new career. I took weather observations, released radiosonde
balloons, and plotted their ascending tracks on a circular plotting board that enabled me
to measure the direction and speed of winds aloft at various altitudes. As a weather
observer, I had always wanted to see a tornado. Whenever I heard thunder or saw a
darkened sky, I would go to an observation deck or up the stairway to the roof to get a
better view. I had only been working there nine days while looking at a black sky from
the north observation deck when one of my colleagues ran towards me asking, “Where
is it, where is it?”

When I inquired what he was talking about, he replied, “The tornado!” To get a
complete view of the sky, I ran up the stairway to the roof and only got to see a white
tornado about 2 miles to the southwest receding back into the base of a large cloud.

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